Cobie Smulders Quotes

I couldn't pick up a sword and go fight anyone, let me put it that way. It's choreography and it's acting. The best sword fights you see look amazing, but it's the acting that sells it more than anything.

I thought martial arts was going to help me with my movies and TV stuff, but I realized it would not.

I have stage combat training from college, which is drastically different than fighting for the screen, but I do enjoy that kind of stuff.

Fight scenes are very physical for me. Sometimes I require my own body to move through them before I can tell where a character's likely to feel it.

I love action. I love stage combat.

The fight scenes are pretty easy and come pretty naturally for me, to be honest.

I'd guess that every American action film would be different. It's just training, training hard, training a lot. Then trying to give your best performance on the day, and I've been lucky so far.

To be a good actor, you need to be able to emote with your body.

In drama school, I learned I wasn't as good as I thought I was. But I loved stage combat, and I knew that would pay the bills.

Mads [Mikkelsen] and I have a really epic brawl - a week shoot, lots of rehearsal - and he was just delightful. He's a dancer and a gymnast so he knows how to plant the moves. He was always saying, "Are you okay?" When you've got that level of mutual consideration you form a family very quickly.

This is going to sound cheesy, but with acting there are so many tools. When you're on camera, you're using all of it. You're using the voice, you're using your body, you're using wardrobe, all of it, but it's funny, once you take all of those things away, you realize how much you rely on the physicality.

I'm just about the movies; I enjoy the dexterity of actors in action movies and the choreography side of things. You've just got to be a different person to be a professional fighter. I train with professional fighters, so I know what it takes. It's a very difficult profession, probably harder then the acting profession.

I really want to do something where I can show my physicality - something with a lot of action. Action would be fun. I'd really like to do that.

When I was dancing, whether it was the music or the story, the question was 'Why am I doing this piece, and why am I dancing?' It is exactly the same when you are acting. You have a very close relationship with your body movement. You have to find the physicality of your character.

Boxing is a lot of preparation and then improvising, so there are parallels to being an actor.

I love action. I love doing fight scenes; I always have. I love it.

For ages, in my lunch hours, I would just go round and choreograph fight scenes. For fun. So now I'm very good at being thrown around. I bounce, in the words of my friends.

I love playing roles that are physical, absolutely love. Whether it's just that kind of basic level of physicality or whether it's stunts.

I hate learning lines, so the fight stuff's always my favorite.

I punch a lot of guys on set. It's much easier than in real life as your hands don't hurt afterwards. The key is that you miss.

Your body - or my body - is just kind of stupid. Like, your body doesn't know whether you're acting something because it's happening or whether you're acting it because it's in the script.

You can have the most emotional moment as an actor, ever, and many people would be like, 'Okay, cool. What's next?' You land one punch in a fight scene, and everyone is like, 'Yeah!'

There are actors that come in and do a fight sequence, but when they have to fall on the ground or take a tag to the belly a bit too hard, they're shocked at how real it is.

Actors are, in a sense, like athletes. They've got to stretch once in a while.

Sometimes you go to a show, and you see someone and think they're not there right now. They're performing, but it's muscle memory. There is no memorising some of the ways we put on a show.