Lake Bell Quotes

I've pretty much played every regional accent you can play in the U.K. I've played German, French, Arabic; I've been Jordanian, Lebanese. I've covered a lot of ground.

I'm always going to be working on my English, and I'm always going to work on my English so that I can do different characters from different nationalities.

The girls in 'Downton Abbey' do what they do so well, which is make it so natural despite the fact that you're living within these constraints and taking so much from the research aspect of it.

With 'Richard,' I was excited to make this film with such an amazing role for an actor. Play a wide range of emotion and really invest myself in the character.

I am a professional actor, and I don't go about moralizing about what the character does. Otherwise, seriously, why be an actor? You're not making some kind of social statement. That's not what actors do.

I'm an actor and my job is to interpret.

It's an actor's job to play all the human conditions - light, dark, and medium.

In my experience, it's usually up to the actor how a character is portrayed.

And as much as I love the gritty characters, I like to play all sorts of characters. I'm an actor. I love to create.

I'd like to play with a period piece. Playing a girl next door in 2010 is so different from playing one in 1950, the way you talk, walk, dress, relationships. It's really fun studying all that.

I'm an actor, and I'm supposed to reflect real people.

I'm able to hang up the character with the costume at the end of the movie.

The role of an actor is to make every character believable.

To play a character is to inhabit the world and the life of that character.

I don't aspire to just play things that are like me. Whether the accent is Taiwanese or British or Canadian - that is the very craft in which I was trained. It is my absolute privilege and honor to do that.

I love to be a vessel through which characters can come through. And if I can move an audience with my work, then I've done my job.

I'm not a writer; I'm an actor. My job is to take whatever character I'm given and - especially because I have the responsibility of being a black actress, and I know young black girls are looking up, and everyone's looking to what's on television - to just try to give whatever character I'm playing as three-dimensional a portrayal as I can.

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've been lucky that even when I was younger, just because of my look or whatever, I was afforded the opportunity or called on to try. 'Can you do this Hispanic character?' 'Can you do this Italian character?' 'Can you do this Jewish-American character?' I just had to develop a facility for their accents.

Larry Drake - I love his work... He plays a very disabled character like the role I'm playing.

There is no first-hand account of what the Queen was saying or thinking, so my job as an actor is to interpret her circumstances.

There's a great tradition of actors taking on parts of much less obvious sympathy.

I'm just trying to play against ethnicity. I got to play a guy from Louisiana in 'The Pacific' named Merriell Shelton, and now I'm playing Elliot Alderman.

If the role is challenging enough, I don't see why I shouldn't play an older man or a father figure. It is not about playing what you are in real life. We are called actors for a reason!

I had a role in 'DodgeBall,' where I played a pirate who played dodge ball. I'd say 80 to 90 percent of my lines were 'Garrr' or 'Arghh.' And it was all about what the quality of your 'Grr-arr' was.