Miguel Ferrer Quotes

I also listened to hours and hours and hours and hours and hours of [J.F.] Kennedy, and I sort of built [ accent]. And then I got on set [of 'J.F.Kennedy' movie ] and forgot it.But that's what you want to do. You want it to just be real. And I think authenticity was better than - people always talk about when an accent doesn't work, and the phrase you always hear is, "It was inconsistent."

We all had to learn Southern accents. It wasn't a big research show. With the 'Wounded Knee' project, I locked myself in my apartment with history books so I would know what we're talking about.

I have always like doing accents; I find it much easier to get into character for me.

Because of the pace of daytime, you don't necessarily have time to work every detail of your character, so you have to bring a lot of it yourself.

As an English actress constantly playing Americans, you already had to step way out of your box in that way.

The best way to honor real people when you play them is to try to tell the story of their dynamics and the struggles that they're dealing with rather than lose sight of the connections and personal relationships, and do a really good job at an accent.

I think a lot of acting is about the removal of self-consciousness. The actor is going to be in front of a lot of people, and will naturally feel self-conscious. So a lot of the preparation for that is the removal of that idea. Like you embody or are connected to this character, therefore you can present this character in a way that eventually, when you come back to see it, you feel not exactly ashamed of.

I hate actors. They never act like people. They just think they do

I find it terribly distracting in movies when people do accents, I must say, unless it's terribly serious and the story is rooted in South Africa and you're doing a South African accent. But in period movies I think nothing can be more distracting than people doing accents.

If you speak in a different accent, you begin to move in a slightly different way. You think in a slightly different way. It's part of trying to find what makes a character.

I think in every character there are aspects of yourself that you bring to it. But then it would be really boring to just play yourself.

My life is a movie set. These people, they all think this is real, but it's not.

You can't play history and you can't play historical characters. You just have to reduce it to the ordinary.

I think the goal is to make a well written scene seem like it's improvised and/or to come up with things that you find in the room that you couldn't have known until you get into the real situation, just try to improve things as you go along.

If I was an actor, it would be like a part that was me. It has to be real to me. I have to make it mine. I really enjoy taking a song I feel that way about, and sometimes it can take a long time to come up with just the right touch. I think that's really my greatest talent, interpreting.

The function of the actor is to make the audience imagine for the moment that real things are happening to real people.

Even in cerebral roles that are seemingly intelligent and nothing else, I think it's so important to wrap your characterization in a physical form as well.

Film, television, and working with a camera is such an intimate art form that if a camera is right on you, and I've got your face filling the screen, you have to be real. If you do anything that is fake, you're not going to get away with it, because the camera is right there, and the story is being told in a very real way.

I think insanity is the hardest thing to play.

When you play a character with power and energy, people lock into that and go, "Oh, this must be the guy."

I don't really think it matters if you go into stage or TV as long as you do a bit of character work, really.

Acting is always sort of the same - like you want to be - you know you're pretending and you want to make it as real as you can. That's the similarity. The mediums other than that are completely different. I mean you know with camera work you're doing really small detailed work and you know if you do anything too big you've sort of failed. And with stage, especially with the play I'm doing right now, I'm doing a farce, and it's so over the top that you can't actually be too big. So it's just completely different.

I think theater has given me the opportunity to show what a character actor I can be.

Acting gives me a chance to be people I will never be, in real life. I like changing who I am.

I don't want to be an English actor doing the greatest American accent you've ever heard. I want to be an American doing nothing.