Edge Quotes

You know, young actors say all the time, 'Should I use my own life experience?' And my response is, 'What choice do you have?'

In acting, you draw so much on your private life.

With acting, it wouldn't be about money: it would be about taking my life experiences and using them to create art.

For me, it is important to pick up characters which I can relate to. Or I recall an incident in my life or tap into my innermost emotions and try to bring that reality on to the screen.

I suppose with any character that you play you always bring your personal experience to it. You always bring people that you know or that you've met and sort of - this is what I do, I mean, I don't know what anyone else does - but people that you know or that you've met that have affected you in certain ways, you bring into it.

I try and imagine myself in situations and figure out how I'd have reacted and responded to them, and then bring that insight into my acting. Much of acting is about borrowing from your real-life experiences.

I always find something in all the characters I play. I fall in love with them a little bit.

There are lots of things to do. Lots of movies to catch. Lots of places to visit... I try to bring in every real life experience into my acting.

In every character you play, as much as you hate to admit it as an actor, but there's an element of you that you bring to it.

I love acting and really taking on another person, another life.

I tend to get comfortable with the dialogue and find out who the person is in the script and try to hit that. People are sort of independent of their occupations and their pastimes. You don't play a politician or a fireman or a cowboy - you just play a person.

For a writer, they say write what you know. As a performer, you find it in yourself, in your heart. You relate to the character. You try to live it, try to have it be real for you.

It's the only way I really know how to tell the story is to be able to kind of live through the characters. So when I find something that resonates with me, it's usually because it cuts to something very real inside of me; something that I've gone through or experienced.

Everything, I think, about acting is based on imagination.

With film, it's all about the actor being able to feel the things that the character's feeling. It must do some strange things to your mind. Music I find much easier because you're being honest about where you are as a person.

With films, you completely immerse yourself in a character, get into who they are, live it and then release it.

As actors, you play people who are not yourselves!

Sometimes you can just step into the character, and you get all your feelings and emotions just from sympathizing with her and being her. But then, other times, you just have to resort back to anything that you've been through in your own life and try to play that.

There are always parts of me that come out in the characters that I play - it's the only thing I have to work with and to draw off of.

I love to act because I love trying on other people's skin.

You jot down ideas, memories, whatever, concerning your real life that somehow parallels the character you're playing, and you incorporate that in your scene work.

I always think of the character as being me. But me wearing a 'coat', which may be a different way of speaking, moving or regarding other people. To me, acting is pretending, just like kids playing, only you pretend as if it were really, really real.

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.

The interesting thing about acting is using all your own stuff and having some kind of personal catharsis while you're working.

I think that you can sort of have your own personal journey and you know, you can just kind of apply that to whatever characters you're playing.