Perdita Weeks Quotes

When you're doing a play that's fully produced, you have the benefit of rehearsing for four or five weeks, so you really get to live in the skin of the character for much longer than when you first start doing a character on TV.

Meryl Streep and Julia Roberts act themselves senseless in 'August: Osage County,' and by the time they're finished, they've acted their movie senseless, too.

I have to say, speaking from experience, just because an actor starts out in a role in the workshop, they won't necessarily play it when it goes to Broadway.

I entered into Dawson's Creek to do a couple of episodes. They weren't sure about my role in the beginning, but then the chemistry kind of worked.

Here's what I knew about doing a play: I knew it would make me a better actor.

Robert Walker as Bruno was excellent. He had elegance and humor, and the proper fondness for his mother.

I've done some TV and I've done a lot of theater, obviously, and the last character I played on Broadway was a very fast-talking broad. I'm used to learning material and words.

Plays are not written but rewritten, and much of the rewriting takes place at the behest of the director, whose job it is to grapple with the myriad complexities of moving a play from the page to the stage.

I have played 50 different kinds of fathers and villains. Only mediocre actors play the part the same way.

The process of doing plays will make you an actor.

When I am cast in a movie where I feel that the woman's part is more interesting, I usually start thinking about Spencer Tracy and Fred Astaire. They seem to be the most clear actors when working with women.

I think when your image becomes so big that it's hard for a viewer to see a character, then I think you're in danger as an actor of being unable to perform what you should be doing.

I used to have this idea that you can spend years in the movies and TV and then, at the drop of a hat, say 'Oh, I'll go back and do the theater.'

In New York theater, you always talk about wanting a great ensemble of actors.

When you're doing a legitimate play, if you have a company of 12, it's considered a big cast.

In the kind of films that I do, there is an extremely limited number of people that can improvise. The reason the ensemble continues in the movies is because those are the people that can do that kind of work. It's not just an accident those people are in the film.

You always hope that people will fall in love with the characters you play, the way you do yourself.

I've always been scared to do a play. I don't know why, because doing 'Happy Days' was like a play with three cameras.

The thing that made 'M*A*S*H' so good was the fact that we did have those relationships off-camera and took them on-camera.

I always ended up having the funny part in Shakespeare, but I really thought I'd be doing theater. That was my ambition for myself.

I always wanted to be an actor. My first professional job was at 19, working in New York theater.

I still care about human behavior and the art that it takes to write a good piece and to get a cast together who cares enough to put 150 percent of their talent into a project.

To be a theater actor, I think you have to do plays all the time.

You can't create chemistry. In fact, the chemistry between two actors is for people to see, sense, and judge. The only thing we can do as actors is to come on board individually because we feel the same kind of passion for a script and for a director to cast us because he feels that, as actors, we'll do justice to that part.

I love doing scenes with two actors in an elevator, but sometimes I'm a little boy, and I like swinging a sword with 800 soldiers around.