Florence Pugh Quotes

Period costume films are fun to discover, but they're not relatable. It's more, 'Wow, that's cool - did it really look like that back then?' Whereas with a comedy, you're like, 'Yeah, that's me, that's my friends.' No matter what, I want people to relate.

Ellis Peters's historical detail is very accurate and very minute, and therefore is not only interesting to read but good for an actor to acquire a sense of the period. And the other thing I think is that an actor lives in the land of imagination.

And the most important thing - apart from telling a good, believable story, and being a true character - is to be someone the audience will care about, even if you're playing a murderer or rapist.

We are Disney, in a sense. When you've been there for 20 years, there's a certain heart and soul to one of those films, and you inhabit that to a certain degree. So if it feels true to you, then your audience will hopefully go for it.

If you get too deep into the history, what often happens to a lot of us actors is that we become stilted. We forget that we're reading about something that happened a hundred years ago. If we don't put the human emotion that would naturally be in there, we end up being stilted instead of being human beings.

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.

It's sort of the most important thing for acting, is to listen to the person you're dealing with.

I'm something of a history buff. It's deliberate that a lot of my films have been period pieces.

The most important thing for me as an actor playing a character is to make you laugh. That's my No. 1 goal.

I like writing historical fiction.

I love the simple poetry of theater, where you can stand in a spotlight on a stage and wrap a coat around you, and say, 'It was 1860 and it was winter...'

And that's what people want to see when they go to the theater. I believe at the end of the day, they want to see themselves - parts of their lives they can recognize. And I feel if I can achieve that, it's pretty spectacular.

I kind of got lost down a road of TV and film, so it's great to come back to theatre.

It's interesting - an actor's research is different to just historian's research. I'm looking for things that I can actually physically use in the movie.

With 'Bright Star' and with 'The Piano,' too, I felt a kind of sadness about it being in such a different era, because of my lack of experience with the era. And one of the ways I'd get over it is to remind myself that every film, even if it's contemporary, creates its own world.

I think when see you a character on the screen who is actually being touched by the world, and the stuff is actually landing on him, it makes you empathize.

I find that with period pieces, you're sort of able to really take advantage of what's around you because prop-wise, wardrobe-wise and location-wise, it's all so specific due to that time.

I do enjoy history. That's one of the things that I love about acting is you get a chance to really dive into history and develop a real personal opinion about it.

Movie acting is primarily listening. If you're really engaged, that's all a movie audience wants to see is you processing what's happening in your world.

For me, with me, making a film is always about humanity.

In my acting, I have tried to do this - to present to audiences a living creature in whom they can recognise themselves or someone they know.

It's about stories. If I can tell the story to America, whether it's Riesling or a boxer from Harlem, it will sell. I know on my gravestone it's going to be, 'Storyteller.'

There are all kinds of ways that people present their films, but that's kind of a good feeling, if you can make it seem like the characters are really there.

My job playing Sam Malone was to let the audience in, to love my bar full of people. And that informed my life.

Well, I think it can be quite helpful to be working on a character who actually existed, historically. Of course, you might have material to study and help you create the character.