Edward G. Robinson Quotes

I sing as an actress. Whatever I'm singing about, I just become the story.

You obviously don't have to be a murderer to play a murderer or you don't have to be a dictator to play a dictator. So, you're an actor. You come up with whatever you come up with to play that part.

Strength of character is already written. What we bring, as an actor, is an almost 3D-ness to it.

You've got to be honest with yourself aesthetically about who could you play. You want to artistically be true to that character.

When you play a doctor, you have to look like you can do it but you don't actually go and do it. It's not like you learn how to cut open somebody and go do surgery. You have to think of a human being and not play the idea of what that would look like.

As actors, you play people who are not yourselves!

Some actors can distance themselves from the parts they play, but I fall into the category who use bits of themselves.

I always think of the character as being me. But me wearing a 'coat', which may be a different way of speaking, moving or regarding other people. To me, acting is pretending, just like kids playing, only you pretend as if it were really, really real.

I think when you play a role, you always have to be a defense attorney for that character.

I've always tried to have a healthy take on the characters I play; they are only characters I play.

There is a little bit of me infused in every character I play.

To play a character is to inhabit the world and the life of that character.

As an actor, you can have your opinions, but our responsibility is telling the point of view of this one character.

You can say to actors that you've got to be the character and really get into it, but you have to make it realistic by bringing an element of yourself into it.

I'm here to play certain characters and give them a voice that they might not have had. That's my job, and like it or not, that's what I'm here to do.

That is the fun of being an actor. You play all different kinds of people.

I don't know how to play a character unless I love him.

Playing characters I don't relate to are a big challenge for me.

I think, for every actor, the most challenging part of playing a character, specially a real-life character, is to convince yourself that you are the character.

The actor's job is to put themselves in the shoes of the character they are trying to portray as truthfully as possible.

For me, portraying a character is not about liking or disliking it; it's about meeting a challenge that's thrown at you.

That is the responsibility of the artist, of the actor, to inhabit these roles and put on somebody else's shoes. It's the responsibility and the gift of what it is I get the opportunity to do.

I would compare it to an actor. I drive myself into the character that later on is in the ring.

As Uta Hagen would say, there's the representational actor and the presentational actor. My sister [Maggie Gyllenhaal] came up to me recently after she saw this movie, Southpaw, the movie I did, and she thought there was this exploration of that type of presentation, and a bit of representation as well, if I could be totally honest, where she was deeply moved.

I'm willing to be representative. I'm just an actor. I'm just playing a role, so even if it is a person I do not like, I would do that.