Shailene Woodley Quotes

That's what acting is all about - it's all about bringing truth from your own life, and putting it into your characters. If you have the advantage of using your own life in your work, that's always the way to go.

You want to be honest with a character and play it truthfully, and you want to be genuine with your character.

I always just get excited about the character. When something rings true for me, then I'm ready to do it.

The thing about any character is that you want to be sincere.

the older I am, the more I refuse to treat my work as therapy and the more I think it's less honest to do that, less about acting. When I was younger, I sometimes used personal things in creating characters, to the point where I thought maybe it was a little bit dangerous - at least for me. But I don't feel that somebody can only be good in a character if they are really becoming that person or really suffering.

When you act, it's better not to fake the emotion. It's better to find the emotion within yourself and your experiences, and see if you can bring that back to the surface, so that you can then literally hand it off to the character, and then let him run with it.

I forget who said it, but someone said, your job as an actor is to communicate the most honest version of this character, and so the parts of you that you can use are obviously the easiest to access, because you live through them every day.

Now I like to think that I'm in my character's head so much that I don't have to substitute. I'm in the moment; I'm living in the moment. And if it's genuine, it's real, and if it comes out it comes out.

All I try to do is as earnestly and as acutely as I can, conceive a character and try to portray this character just honestly. If the humor is within the absurdity and the awfulness of situations, then let it be seen that way.

You know, young actors say all the time, 'Should I use my own life experience?' And my response is, 'What choice do you have?'

The thing is, even if you're playing sort of a heightened character and playing inside sort of a heightened reality, you can still apply your own truths to those characters.

You can't just tell actors, especially young ones, to 'act happy' and expect them to do it. They must in some essential way be happy.

It's the emotional trigger points that are important to me because I know if I could believe in the characters and try and imagine how they felt then I'd be able to do something quite honest.

You'll very rarely find that you can enhance a performance to give it a real emotional centre and truth... after the fact.

I don't like to objectify the people I play. I always try to go for the truth in any part.

I've always felt that acting is acting, at the end of the day, so whether you're doing comedy or heavy drama or anything else in between, you always have to bring a semblance of honesty to it. It's all make believe.

Even great actors who transform who they are still go to a really honest place; I think that's sort of that special skill that actors have.

I would want the audience to simply see the character I portray in each movie in its true essence because I feel acting is all about truthfully portraying the character.

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

As an actor, I believe that acting is actually behaving truthfully under imaginary circumstances.

First of all, I never think of my characters as good or evil. I play them as honestly as I can. When you're playing a good character, you have an idea that you're playing the hero and the good guy.

On the other hand, we don't come to work with all of these social goals, nor are we directly trying to change the world and all of that. Our job is that we have these human characters, and it's our responsibility to play them truthfully and as human as possible. Jill has cast this impeccably. These actors nail it, even the non-Pfeffermans. It's ridiculous.

It's kind of amazing; I don't know anything. It's an interesting way to work where you're living in the moment and making decisions for your character in the moment. You have to go with your gut on everything - try not to over-think things. That tends to make me doubt what I did, but then that's always the case. I'm a worrier. I have to accept that and just be a worrier.

For me, what makes great actors, always is how truthful they are to the character and the story and the emotion that they're trying to tell.

As an actor, you have to just think about the truth of your character. You have to think about how to play the character in the way that you know it needs to be played in your heart and why you were hired.