Gerard Butler Quotes

As an actor, the only pressure I have is to just be truthful and to do my best work.

I think it's incumbent on actresses to bring something else to the part which isn't in the script.

Any acting job that I ever got, I always treated it like I was a neophyte; I didn't know what I was doing, and I was going to work just as hard as I do on my stand-up.

Most of my training at graduate school was geared towards drama, so I feel good about it, and I can do it, but it requires a lot more work from me. I feel like with drama... well, with all acting, really, you need to honor the truth of the situation.

The one thing for an actor that is complete death is if you're bored, because that boredom will show in your work.

I think when you're acting, you usually don't have to know too much beyond how to pronounce the words you're saying.

When you prepare for something, you can then play around; you're not as worried about remembering your lines because you already know them so well. That's where you can find the freedom. So I'm all about prep work.

Now that I'm acting, I've realized that I don't have a lot of barriers. Certain actors have a hard time with anger or with joy or with whatever, and, I don't know, I don't seem to have those barriers.

I think I'm sort of method in a sense, and I enjoy, you know, trying to find that reality in fake emotion.

I am not that big a method actor.

A role needs a certain tone, so your own tone also changes. It's not like I lock myself up in a room to get into the zone. It is based on what I am feeling, because the minute you try too much, weird things happen. Of course, for an intense role you need some silence, and you need to do a lot of thinking.

People think acting is just memorizing lines and doing facial expressions. No it's about traveling along a path of discovery, intention and connection.

I think it's important as an actor to stay really ignorant.

All that acting and all that stuff and emoting and crap will come after you know what you're doing. So when you get - when I get on stage, I don't have to think about it.

As always, with acting, you can't be too self-conscious. You shouldn't care about what people are thinking about you at the time because they're not caring about you, they're caring about the character.

As an actor, you're lucky if you get a month before a project starts. There are times when you get a day before a project starts. So to be able to really sit and inhabit that mind and the story is really beneficial, and it really helps for me to be able to then compartmentalize as we're shooting and detach and go somewhere else.

I have learned that acting is not about beauty.

The worst acting is about imitation.

For the actors, the talent is to serve the demands that I ask of them, to do it with naturality and truth, and to be honest when we were terrified.

The joy of acting for me is to be able to experience emotions in a safe environment. You can't scream and cry in the street because everybody will look. If you do it on a movie set, you get applauded.

I had an acting teacher tell me once that if you're playing a car salesman, you don't want to be an OK car salesman, you want to play the best car salesman.

For actors, you've gotta sometimes fill in your backstory.

Sometimes I think of movie acting as advanced pretend.

I tend not to have any references to anything. I just jump into the script in front of me. If you reference too much, you have no idea if the performances are right.

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.