Brian Blessed Quotes

I love acting, and ultimately all my characters are very different, and each character I love in a different way.

I don't see any difference in the craft of acting, in film or television. It's absolutely the same. It's different storytelling, playing a character over multiple hours, as opposed to two.

The worst acting is about imitation.

As long as you have the acting chops and the desire to get inside a character, you can play anything.

That's what I love about acting, is playing different roles. I want to work for the character, and not make it work for me.

I still think of myself as a stage actor. When I do film and television I try to implement what I was taught to do in theatre, to try to stretch into characters that are far from myself.

Well, with each character that I play in my life as an actor, I try to figure out how to find the challenge.

I used to have a lot of philosophies of acting; they all fell apart over the years.

As an actor, I think the experience and the portrayal of the character is exactly the same. It doesn't make any difference what camera is capturing it. You have to do it with the same passion.

I am a professional actor, and I am very careful about being sincere to the characters I play.

Part of being an actor is being able to contribute to a character's rhythms. If there's room to explore, you find a happy medium. We almost always get it as written, and then, we throw some improvs in or some alternatives.

Each form of the acting is different. I think it keeps your mind active. TV, film and theater are different disciplines, as are independent films, opposed to studio films. There are differences in the size and the genre, or a period drama as opposed to a contemporary drama, or the types of characters.

Theater to me is acting but it's more real on film.

I love acting... I really do. I love crawling into another character's skin. That's something that I've always, always, always, always wanted.

Actors walk around wearing these little tool-belts of acting skills. And I just don't find that interesting to watch. I never want to see someone who clearly can cry at the drop of a hat. That's so uninteresting.

I'm still trying to figure myself out as an actor.

The way that actors talk about acting is generally quite punishing, and I think actors want to put forward the idea that they do all of this work because, you know, it's a post-De Niro world, when, largely, in fact, it's almost never true.

Everything, I think, about acting is based on imagination.

For me, personality acting is not that interesting. I don't want to just be myself.

I think there's a lot of mythos about what's required in acting. The way that actors talk about acting is generally quite punishing, and I think actors want to put forward the idea that they do all of this work because, you know, it's a post-De Niro world, when, largely, in fact, it's almost never true.

In theater, you're playing characters. You believe you're somebody else, and you're acting.

I don't usually like talking about acting or what my process is, and all those kinds of things, because I don't necessarily think it's helpful to talk about how I do my job.

See, that's the thing: I'm not one of those actors who thinks, 'God, I've got to improvise and make it my own.' No, my first job as an actor is to take what's written and make it work. And then, if they want me to improvise, I'll do that.

You can't generalise, of course, but there is a school of American acting where there is a kind of pride in the number of takes you can do.

A lot of male actors are method actors and they become the characters which they both were.