David Schwimmer Quotes

I've always played characters that were younger than myself.

A lot of high school students on TV and in Broadway are played by people in their late 20s and even early 30s. That seems weird to me.

It often strikes me that the actors in high school movies look too old.

A lot of people are shocked when they hear that I played a 14-year-old.

I just don't think I can write someone drastically younger than me.

It's not any desire on my part to start playing dads, but it's a convention of drama. If you don't get the parts of young people going out to nightclubs, you have to play their fathers.

I've always been short and stocky. So when I got into repertory theatre after graduation, I found myself doing character roles: because of my deep voice, shape and height, I was playing 40-year-old, 50-year-old roles at the age of 23.

Usually, I play people who are a lot younger than I am, because people think that I look really young, which I do.

I never really get to play a character who's my own age. I kind of look a little bit younger for my age.

I tend to play a lot of characters that are 10 or 15 years older than me.

In 'Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,' I play a schoolteacher who is older than I am in life - and I like that.

In rehearsals I get so completely wrapped up with the reality that's occurring on stage that by the time the play has opened I'm not usually quite as aware of the distinctions between what I'd intended and the result. There are many ways of getting the same result.

I think it serves the purpose of the film if the premise is that you're unsure of me because you've only ever really seen me play villains.

In my career, I've often played the protagonist or the hero of the movie, and there are so many rules inherent to that role. The audience needs to stay with you, identify with you and like you. When you play the bad guy, those rules go out the window. There's so much freedom there.

It bugs me when they have people my age [28] playing teenagers.

I think you get the parts that people are comfortable with seeing you play. I get that. And I don't shy away from those parts.

Movie acting is harder than doing a play. You have to be entertaining but completely natural, like Jimmy Stewart and Cary Grant. They weren't doing anything. Do you have any idea how hard that is? That's how good they were. It's crazy hard to be convincing and real. It's the most subtle, hardest thing there is.

Sort of what you do in drama school when asked to play something way out of your reach. Anyway, we used to laugh a lot about that. I used to say I'm not going to act old, Penelope. I'll just be myself.

I like things where I can do a physical transformation, and I love accents and voices, and I'm never going to play the same character twice.

The media can make anything true or untrue. So if you do 80 films and you play a bad guy ten times, then you're a bad guy, and then the media repeats that.

No matter what the characters you play, you have to find the differences in them, especially when you are doing a political movie.

As an actor, I usually have to find something to love about my character in order to play her.

I love villains. You know, I am a character actor, and any chance to get to play a really outrageous villain. I like to play that.

It was the challenge of that that I found daunting, but also engaging and interesting [to play Maigret].

I think you're bound to get a sense of any character that you play. It's not something you often do in comedy.