Simon McBurney Quotes

I like to disappear in the parts I play.

My job always is to play a person, not to judge her.

Sometimes I've found that by getting into a certain drag, or a certain feeling, you can cast off your mortal coil and really do something. I don't know if it's important, but it's something. It's entertainment.

Of course you can find something exciting and dynamic in any character you want to portray.

Acting is an imaginative leap, really, isn't it? And imaginations prosper in different circumstances.

When I was in theater I was forever trying to inhabit a space which puts yourself under the microscope as an actor and your personality and your take on life, but actually through another portal of a character.

It was a big deal to me to play characters and feel things and connect to somebody in a fake world.

That's, to me, the ultimate goal - to disappear inside another character and bring them so fully to life that I've convinced other human beings that it's a real person.

I'm trained in the theater, and acting, for me, is about the imaginative life I create for myself, not about basing it on something real. I think that whatever I create becomes the reality for the audience.

I recognize my physical limitations, but I am an actor who is able to transform himself into someone else.

I think when you're in the middle of a piece of work, there are things that bleed over into your life. You're spending a large portion of your day pretending to be somebody else, to tell somebody else's story.

I think Johnny Depp could play just about any role - I'd love to see what he would do with the Red Queen!

My mother took me to a lot of operas and when I was eight I got the opportunity to be in one and I realized that transformation into these make-believe situations was possible. I decided that was essentially what I wanted to do with my life.

Playing a character is an illusion, and I feel that when you know too much about a person, possibly part of that illusion is disrupted.

Acting is the ability to dream on cue.

As an actress, I'm drawn to emotion and expressing the human condition in all its forms, and I'm fortunate to have thoughts and feelings at my fingertips.

Of all the things I do, acting is the thing that grabs most, but there's another level on which it strikes me as being a little silly. In the end you're dressing up and deciding to be somebody.

I love disappearing. That's what acting is. For me it's about putting on a persona, stepping into a pair of shoes. It's my face, but I'm using it as a tool for that spirit, that character.

I love the creating part of taking on a character. It is fun to be another person and create what it would be like to be that person.

To me, getting to do music and videos, you work on a character. Being onstage is acting; you get to be larger than life and larger than yourself.

Movies are all about plot. Theater, even if it's story heavy, it's about ideas. Theater has to resonate in your heart in a way that movies don't.

As an actor, our very palette is one of imagination. So it is a walk onto an empty space and then imagine the world beyond it is what we do.

I really do literally put myself into a character's shoes.

In terms of the character itself, I can't really say that I find anything really difficult. I enjoy the character so much I don't perceive difficulty in trying to be him. It's just a matter of how do we get there.

I think in many ways, I'm sort of a blank canvas, because in many ways, I'm just observing the world and the people around me and their characters and letting them kind of explode off me and to find out why they're doing what they're doing. But then every once in awhile, I get to take on a whole new character.