Ann Dowd Quotes

Acting is not just impersonating your character.

Actors walk around wearing these little tool-belts of acting skills. And I just don't find that interesting to watch. I never want to see someone who clearly can cry at the drop of a hat. That's so uninteresting.

Yeah, I think the common denominator - and this is probably going to sound like Acting 101 - but the common denominator is belief in the character in the moment.

For me, personality acting is not that interesting. I don't want to just be myself.

Obviously an actor draws on his own experience.

Acting is not acting. It isn't putting on a face and dancing around in a mask. It's believing that you are that character and playing him as if it were a normal day in the life of that character.

You can say to actors that you've got to be the character and really get into it, but you have to make it realistic by bringing an element of yourself into it.

I knew what kind of actor I was going to be, and I looked for inspiration to people like Alec Guinness, Cyril Cusack, Timothy Spall and Jim Broadbent. I looked at them and thought, 'They play human beings as they really are.'

I like method actors who don't focus on the glamorous side, but on realistic acting.

A lot of cinema is about the game of authenticity - do you feel it's real?

I believe in the fact that to portray a character convincingly, you need to live that character, own that character. You have to be earnest with every line that you deliver. However, it doesn't mean that you have to cut off your true self.

There's this whole list of old personalities that I can act, as corny as that sounds, or as method actor as that sounds.

That's my way in the very beginning - how to enter it [a role]. Very quickly in the process, I don't think about voice being separate from the way you hold your head or the way you sit or the way you put on lipstick. It's all a piece of a person, and it's all driven by conviction.

It's fashionable for modern actors to talk about getting 'inside' a character. But you can't get to the inside without getting the outside right first.

Every role is approached in exactly the same way, you have to make it believable and that's all. Acting is really serious, like, pretending really hard.

I've been given lots of great advice, in my life. As an actor, just being as honest and as present as you can be.

The type of acting that I'm interested in, that I aspire to, is where I try and drag a lot of myself into whatever character it is. They can be very different types of characters, but at the heart of it, I always wanted to be a very, very believable and rooted in reality. One of the ways of doing that is to root it as much as you can in your own experiences and then tint those with different hues, different colors to give the different characters their way.

What you're trying to do as an actor is somehow trick yourself into believing that these words have never been said, and so you've got to discover them for the first time.

My job is to try and present the most fully-rounded character that I can, and bring a performance that people believe in.

Transformational acting was the reason why I became an actor in the first place. Your hair and make-up and the costume are the tools that you have, and it makes you feel like that person. When you look in the mirror, you don't feel like yourself, and it changes the way you move. I love that stuff.

The worst acting is about imitation.

Some actors get by with behaving, not acting. You've got to sell the effect. I act more in the 'Nightmare' movies because it's not like me. I'm acting, not reacting.

Actors are pretending for you, but they're not lying. They are not putting on a guise instead of themselves. They are finding things inside that they have experienced.

All I've ever tried to do is play real people.

Being an actor in movies is a lot about the power of your imagination and making the circumstance real to you so the audience will feel that it's real.