Scott Cohen Quotes

I try to allow the spirit of the character to live through me. That's the only way I know how to approach acting. I have to live it.

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.

Every actor turns everything round to their character.

There's a wonderful adage in acting that you're stuck with the character, but the character is also stuck with you.

It kind of varies. I don’t have a method yet. It depends on the script and the character I think I need. I’ve worked with acting coaches, researched roles, and channeled different parts of myself. It’s on a case-by-case for me, right now.

I had the prosthetics on, and I went to my trailer, I looked in the mirror, and I smiled. And I was, like, "This is the character - everything she does is with a smile and a bit of glee and joy." And that's how I created Darla [from Buffy The Vampire Slayer]. Prior to that, I was, like, "I have no idea how to play this 400-year-old vampire from hell!".

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.

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.

Acting is acting, and who you are will still remain to be who you are. You know, that part won't change it. It will change your wallet, you know? It'll change your life. It will open opportunities for you, but it's not going to change your character.

I just love to act. I like to get away, totally play a different character, someone you can get really involved in knowing. I've gotten really involved in some characters and written down little summaries of where they live and what their families are like.

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.

That's why I enjoy acting: getting in the mind of someone else.

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.

I like to disappear in the parts I play.

That's what I love about acting, you get to find little pieces of yourself in every character you play.

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. Either the character helps you discover that element of you or the other way around, where that element of you helps you discover the character.

Ultimately, the idea of acting is to understand the people you're playing, and then where they're coming from is not so mystifying. You've got to detox a bit after, though.

I still love finding the soul of the characters I play and defining who they are. This to me is my paint set, and the colors are always exciting to choose.

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

I don't like to intellectualize about my acting.

Acting is a bit of a heart and soul exercise with me. It's kind of all I've got.

As an actor all we want to do is act and play people.

Well, from an acting point of view, I bear no relation, I don't look like Alfred Kinsey at all, but I thought somewhere in my artist's soul, my actor's soul, I could capture something of the spirit of the man.

A performer needs to feel the part to be the part!

When you do a play, you do it for a couple months, and it just gets in your bones. You can learn about somebody that way.