Joshua Henry Quotes

Love every role to be new, and I always like to bring a freshness to every character I play, but that comes down to the script. So, it's important that it's a good script with good, truthful characters and truthful subjects.

You read a script, you try and think through what is the best, most wide-ranging way of telling the story: who stylistically, character-logically, psychologically fits inside the world of what you're trying to do. A lot of it, when you're casting, is trying to get yourself in the head of a director.

I'm a character and relationship guy, and even with the 'Saw' films, it's special-effects people's jobs to create these scary things. It's not my job. My job is to bring some sense of humanity to the character, no matter how evil he may be. The script is going to take me there.

In the work that I normally do, you have a whole script, a whole arc, that you play. And I do believe a good actor will play every bit of information they're given.

In my career, there have been three things that were challenging: playing gay; playing a Jewish woman; and playing Chekhov. The scariest part was playing Chekhov!

Even as an actor, I think like a storyteller. My parents raised us to look at the script.

For any book, it's distilling all of the moments in the book that are either fan favorites or pivotal that you have to have in there, and how you tie that all up into a two hour movie is not the easiest job.

I look at scripts really for whether they can be moving or penetrate some kind of truth. You are constantly chasing that feeling as an actor when every part of a production comes together.

If you can have heart as well as the comedy, it takes you a lot further. I think that that's what we were trying to do with 'Gigi.'

When a script moves me, I find that I immediately understand a character. Of course not completely, but I do understand.

Every role is challenging in its own way, but the most challenging roles are the ones that are badly written - then it's completely up to you to come up with something that is interesting to the story and myself as an actor.

Part of an actor's job is to draw up a back story.

I'm all for whatever transitions the book properly to a movie.

The theoretical casting part of movies is the funnest part. You really can imagine so many different versions of a story based on who's embodying it.

Your structure and format may not be perfect, and you may not have picked the perfect franchise, but if I pick up a script, and the characters are real, whole, complicated and come from a place of somebody who really is feeling it, that's what people remember.

I've always been one to want to memorize everything and just be confident that I know all of the lines, but that changed. After college, I realized it's not as much about being off-book as it is about completely understanding the character and, more so, getting into the mind of your character.

As an actor, you don't really have a say or a voice in what the conversation of the show is going to be. So, as an actor, I'm just trying to make sense of why the character is making these choices, and somehow, in that way, you can sympathize or root, at least not detest, what this person is doing. That's, at least, my job in telling that story.

I've approached every character I've ever played with a poem, first and foremost.

If you can find a way your character moves, you know more about your character than you'd ever dream.

Your job as an actor is to piece together whatever you've learned in your training, or whatever you have experienced in your life, to piece together a person.

As an actor, your first priority is the work - immersing yourself in the role, backstory, and bringing that to screen.

For me, if the words are good on the page, the rest of it comes from spending some time with the script, and not like you're learning lines but absorbing what the script has to offer.

I'm not really a guy who draws on things from my own past. I think if you're a competent actor with a good imagination, and if it's on the page, it makes your job a lot easier. If it's well written, it allows your imagination to run wild and draw inspiration from that.

When I act, I try to understand the character, why she's behaving like that.

With comedy, I've always had a pretty good sense of what I like and how to execute it well, but drama has its own rules.