Chinua Achebe Quotes

When I'm [playing] a character, I can look at it and know it's not me and not be concerned with how it looks.

It was only when I started making short films in college and I was looking for girls to play the me-ish parts that I thought, Well, maybe I'm just going to try doing this myself before somebody else comes in and handles it. For a long time my acting was just a marriage of convenience between me and these characters that I was writing.

I've tried most of my career to transform myself towards characters.

You don't have to kill somebody to play a murderer. You have to read the script and interpret the character.

I'd like to think that I don't have a stock character that I go to. I'm lucky in that when you get to initiate your own scene, you get to play whoever you want. That's really kind of cool, but all my characters are short. I look on the videotape, and I thought they were taller, but they're all 5'2".

I always try to do something very different with each character because that's why I like to do this, because I can become someone else completely and it's fun.

I get some acting jobs. I like it other than the constant slipping in and out of character.

I've had to play characters who I absolutely disagree with, as far as their politics, as far as their religion, and their stance on certain social issues, I completely disagree with them. But I have to go in and find who they are and get to their core, into their truth, and have absolute faith and believe in that, in order to portray it. So you have to walk in a lot of different shoes, in that you can't help but have your mind open as a result of that.

There is never a personal-life connection between my characters and myself. I'm a professional and I can access what I need to access, so there's no bleed-over. I didn't need to believe in aliens to play Mulder. As for my personal life, everything is fantastic right now.

Sometimes an actor performs a character, but sometimes an actor just performs. With writing, I don't think it's performing a character, really, if the character you're performing is yourself. I don't see that as playing a role. It's just appearing in public.

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.

I'm a character actor, so as a character actor, I'm always looking for something interesting.

Playing a drunk doesn't mean being a drunk, only bad actors try to be drunk. A real drunk tries to be sober, he wants another drink. How a character hides their feelings tells us who they are, no one shows their feelings except bad actors.

As an actor, you're used to putting on characters, taking them off, becoming someone else, doing your research, and working on that.

I'm all for whatever it takes to get wherever you need to get with a character, as long as you don't wipe it on me.

As an actor playing a character, I can't come in with my judgement, or else I can't play it honestly. My judgement has to be reserved for later.

I have never wanted to be a queen! Cleopatra was a role, and I am an actor, so it was fun to play one, but it's not real.

If you're writing on your own, each character is just you. It's just you.

The reason I trained so hard in school was so that I could be versatile and play any character. With all these in my bag, I'm like a chameleon. I always tell other young actors to go to school, or at least watch movies to learn as much as you can.

The most important thing in playing any character is not judging.

What I like to do as an actor is transform. It's way more fun to play characters who are completely different than me. I like playing characters who appear one way on the outside but are actually very different from that.

When you play a character, you bring yourself into the character. You get a chance to shine and show your translation for the character and her state of mind.

I'll never accept that I'm a sex symbol. That will mean that someone is a bit too fond of himself. If it happens, I think it's certainly going to be odd. People shouldn't see me as a sex symbol. I'm really just Henry. I'm just telling a story. I could be playing an incredibly unpleasant character who's not sexually attractive at all in my next movie. So I've no expectations at all.

I tended to lean toward character work. I love to disguise myself.

I play a lot of characters where I don't even speak in my own voice. I learned about focus and I learned to trust that things can work when they're not heightened and that it's interesting when things are pared down.