Peter Falk Quotes

Once you have the pattern of life of this person, the choreography, so to speak, you have the canvas that you present eight times a week, not without feeling underneath it, but it's not as churning as the discovery process was.

I really prefer the actual experience of being onstage and living the character from beginning to end with the energy of the audience. There's nothing that beats that feeling, and yet I really have trouble with the eight shows a week.

I love TV now, and 'Modern Family,' but what draws me back to theater is that initial instinct of wanting to be a theater actor. I love the challenge of starting a play and not stopping until you finish. I love the immediacy of trusting your instincts.

I'm unable to do the thing that Broadway actors do in plays, sometimes for years. The same exact blocking, the same exact lines. I'm a little bit uncomfortable with that. Every night I'm looking for ways to try something else.

I stopped performing because I don't have the temperament of a performer. You have to want to do the same thing over and over again. Once I got it right, I didn't want to do it again. I always use the analogy of a novelist who has to read his novel in public night after night. I just didn't want to do it.

You've got to perform in a role hundreds of times. In keeping it fresh one can become a large, madly humming, demented refrigerator.

I don't want to play the same character seven times. I think people would probably get bored of it.

In theater, the wellspring of the character comes from the doing of it, like a trial by fire, but in front of an audience.

One of the things an actor tries to access is immediacy, so that you feel like you're experiencing it for the first time. But when you're playing a character who knows what's going to happen and can't stop himself to reacting although he knows he can't stop himself from reacting, there's a whole separate set of things to consider.

With all due respect to 'The Vampire Diaries,' doing the same thing, over and over again, for essentially five years straight, it really becomes laborious and tedious, and it becomes a job. You obviously find gratification in acting, but you're playing the same character. No matter how compelling it is, it starts feeling pretty monotonous.

It has to be really interesting for me to perform the same role for 365 days non-stop. It becomes taxing for an actor to perform the same character for 12 hours every day, and then, after a point, there's no growth.

To do eight shows a week saying exactly the same lines, you have to be obsessively perfecting it or utterly mindless.

After joining theatre, I started thinking that acting in films was not half as challenging as theatre.

If I don't try and bring variety in my appearances, I will get bored with films, so I can well imagine how bored the audience would get watching me.

I've never done anything like 'Brotherhood' before. It was a great challenge to take up a part in a live audience sitcom - it was amazing.

There are often days when I've sat down in my office for hours and prepped for a show knowing, three minutes before I go on, some big crazy thing happens where everything is thrown out, and the teleprompter goes blank.

I was never reluctant to play this character; the only thing I was scared of was that Bua might be only subjected to insults on-screen which people might start taking it in bad taste. But it turned out totally opposite.

I used to almost not look forward to recording, because it was like, 'Okay, what am I going to have to sacrifice?'

It is really difficult to read a movie script about yourself and to think that a major actor - perhaps even Chris Pine - is going to play this role is really daunting.

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.

Doing eight shows a week is hard.

I don't really get a buzz from playing characters that are similar to me 'cause that's not acting to me.

I'm confident when I perform but going into a horrible, boring studio and playing the same thing over and over again is really different to being on stage!

But one of the satisfying things about performing a play is you know for that piece of time exactly what you're going to be doing. Your life has a physical pattern. There's something about the odd, repetitious nature of it that I find hugely relaxing. All the problems of life are taken care of for that bit of time.

Getting a script and being like, 'Oh, yeah, I can do this in my sleep.' Who wants to do that? So, finding something that is a real challenge and is going to take all of you, I think, is more rewarding by the end of it.