Meryl Streep Quotes

Acting, it's the disappearance of self, disappearance of your own needs and your own wants and the kind of embracing of the character that makes it work.

I'm an actor. I'm trying to be the character and do what they're doing.

As an actress, you get to basically be your character.

I take my time to get into the mindset of the character and say my lines. I really have to be the person that I am playing.

You try to become the character that you're working with. So for me, I try to block out the cameras and try to trick my mind that this is actually happening.

One of the things I love most about acting is just disappearing in the role, as much as I can. I think that's one of the things that intrigued me about it.

Every character lives in ever actor and if you're doing your job right, you're just accessing that part of your fantasy life. I can kill someone just as quickly as I can have sex with someone. You can switch that instinct, no matter what - you can pretend anything.

To me, acting is a matter of absolute concentration. You can laugh and giggle with your friends up to the minute the director says, "Action!" Then you snap your mind into shape and into the character that you're playing and relate to the people that you're acting with and forget everybody else that you've been joking with.

What I didn't realize about television was that's true of acting, as well. You have that space of time to develop who you are, and you can use more and more of yourself. The lines between that character that I'm playing and myself become more and more blurred and, after awhile, they just disappear, altogether.

I'm really lucky because my goal, as an actor, is to disappear into the characters that I'm playing.

You can over complicate everything with techniques; when you're in the moment, you have to feel that you are that character, that you're feeling the pain or the happiness or whatever it is that they're feeling in that moment. Usually the authenticity will manifest itself.

I just like to inhabit a character really deeply.

There's a kind of acting that goes on in my head when I'm writing a character where I put myself in their place.

One of the pleasures of being an actor is that it takes you places you wouldn't ordinarily go, and you don't enter as a tourist, you really enter the life of the place.

I needed to stay in the character.

Successful actors and actresses have to get themselves into their roles before acting. Therefore, you need to really care about what you are saying.

I surprised myself, that I was in the tissue of the character enough, that I could actually come up with something that I didn't actually feel or didn't believe.

I try to put myself into whatever character I play.

Even when you think you can detach yourself from the characters, you don't. Because you're spending so much time trying to realize this person and make them real that they do infect you, in a way. And you do take them home and live with them, even if you think you're turning the character off. But in order to pull off a role convincingly, you wind up thinking about that person all the time, and it does sort of creep into you. And then there are things that you'll respond to, or react to in a very different way than you would normally.

If I was an actor, it would be like a part that was me. It has to be real to me. I have to make it mine. I really enjoy taking a song I feel that way about, and sometimes it can take a long time to come up with just the right touch. I think that's really my greatest talent, interpreting.

I don't like to intellectualize about my acting. I don't sit around and study the pages of a script over and over again. I don't worry whether the period is contemporary or three hundred years ago. Human beings are all alike. The main thing in acting is honesty, to feel the humanity and get to the essence of the character. You can't put anything into a character that you haven't got within you.

It doesn't happen all the time, but in the moments where you really lose yourself and you fall into this character, it's like time travel.

I'm not an actor who approaches films doing a lot of research. I do zero research, unless it's a film where I'm playing a mock version of someone who already existed. Then, you've got to do a lot of research.

I don't think there's a certain part of a character I take with me. There's a certain part of me I leave with each character, though.

I can't help moving my face - reacting - when I watch a movie, because I'm really inhabiting a character. I know this is weird, but it demonstrates what I love about cinema: it allows you to live a different life, to have a different experience, to disappear for two hours. I think it's wonderful.