Urmila Matondkar Quotes

There is this miraculous thing I heard Hugh Grant talking about - the thing about screen acting is that you can read people's thoughts. You are trying to register something inside and usually the eyes in cinema are where you will register that.

I play guys who never smile, and I never stop smiling.

An actor's body should be full of emotions, whether it is happiness or sorrow, pain or joy, enraged or elated.

Not all actresses know how to express their looks, I think. For me, it's an on-again, off-again thing. I'm still struggling.

If anything, I'm overacting in the ring because of the facials and the body language. I want the guy in the cheap seats to be able to see what I'm thinking, the expression on my face. But when you're filming a movie, it could be a two- or three-camera shot, and you're doing it over and over and over again. It's not live TV; it's a lot different.

There's lots of incredible roles out there that I'd love to tackle, but there's a select group of actors I find myself gravitating towards, like Philip Seymour Hoffman or Sean Penn or Daniel Day-Lewis - real transformational actors.

Sometimes I think of movie acting as advanced pretend.

When you perform, you can convey emotions differently, and your look can reflect each of those emotions.

Good actors, you always know what they're thinking. That's why they're good actors.

As actors, you do have to be aware of your audience. You can't act in a vacuum, even if that audience isn't exactly present with you.

This acting's serious! And I really respect those actors. It's a tough business to be able to be something you're not and be natural and convince people on camera.

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.

I found out was, by the rhythm of my chewing, how I chewed fast, slow or what have you, I could tell the audience what my character was thinking and feeling.

I think sometimes soap acting gets an unfair label for being bad and over the top. The lessons I learned there were so valuable. Seeing yourself every day on television, you learned what worked and didn't work, what was bad acting and what wasn't. Memorizing scripts became second nature.

I'm a Jack of all trades character actor, really.

As an actress, I was trained to show emotion I did not feel, or no emotion at all.

A lot of the stuff that I do with Betty is in the eyes. A lot of the feelings that I evoke with her are unspoken, so that's been fun to play with.

I like to use my hands. When I was in theatre in college, that was one of my biggest notes: 'You use your hands too much.'

If you look at me in 'Ride Along,' even though I'm playing two different characters, my demeanor and my tone were not aggressive.

Character acting is a much braver pursuit than a guy who runs around and intermittently clenches his jaw muscles.

I watched season four of 'The Wire.' They have subtle performances that they do through their eyes. You could watch season four with the audio off and still understand what's happening through their eyes.

The best way to show an emotion is not through a character's words, but their smallest expressions - to take what an actor would visually do and try putting that down on the page for the reader to 'see.'

When watching movies, I was always inspired by the performances of the cast. Of course, the story and the direction and all that intrigued me. But what actors would propel themselves to do, and be, was awesome. It was like, how could these people give so much?

Breathing is always key in any character. When you have a character with no voice, that makes it even more important.

Emotions often must be portrayed from an inner feeling, of course, but I had a double advantage because I was learning to direct my as-yet expressionless feelings as well as gaining an ability to express emotion by a very conscious manipulation of my muscles.