Billy Bob Thornton Quotes

As actors, that has been challenging for us to pick up the nuances of the living legends we are playing.

You can't really judge characters, because that's when it gets really hard to play them.

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 think singing and acting go hand in hand. Take an R&B singer: one song says, 'I love you,' the next is, 'Baby, don't leave me', the next is, 'If you leave me I don't care.' You have to drop in and out of different perspectives.

I went through this realization that acting, at its heart, is the ability to manipulate your own emotions.

That's one of the things that's great about acting. You can play all the different aspects of a human being.

I like doing stuff that is sad or angry. It's a challenge, because you're doing a mix of scenes and you're making a person.

At a certain point in my career, I was probably having a difficult time 'holding space.' So you get a character that has to be commanding in order for him to resonate and make sense.

None of the characters I've played are really like me. That would be boring. That wouldn't be acting.

What makes an actor, I think, is a combination of a deep curiosity about life and a case of the crazies.

Sometimes I think of movie acting as advanced pretend.

I have just gained a deeper and deeper respect for acting and the whole art of it because you're really trying to live a life and to do the best justification for it.

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

I think the buzz of acting is playing people different to you, and for me, that means traversing all genres.

What's interesting about the process of acting is how often you don't know what you're doing.

I like playing characters with as many emotions as possible. I'd love to play a really crazy person - someone truly out of her mind.

Actors have either got to play something that's close to them, or something that's the complete opposite.

Actors are responsible to the people we play.

The interesting thing is, when you play a real-life character or someone based in a book, you always come up against people's preconceptions of what they have in their heads.

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

As an actor, you don't want to play a one-dimensional character.

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

My dream role would be someone anything that Meryl Streep can do. 'Julia and Julia' - I thought that was beautiful. She just had the essence of her. To truly become someone, invoking emotions like happiness and sadness and everything in between, that's what I want to be able to do.

I feel that one of the hardest things in acting is the way you need to switch your emotions.

To be an actress and act crazy is really fun for me, to be able to be acting like you'd never be able to act in your real life and scream and freak out. It's an interesting test for an actor.