Dallas Roberts Quotes

If you do a scene and you really like a character in it or a premise in it to write it down and to work on it so that you can have five or six characters that you can pull out in an audition.

Whenever you have a role where you don't get to know anything about the character, you have to invent it yourself. You have to feel like it came from somewhere.

Well, it was very interesting to play a character and stretch it over such a long time - 12 episodes. I had never done a TV show before, so week to week it was unclear what we would be asked to do.

I love to see how a character unfolds off the page in a project. I don't always know how the character is going to turn out, even with the script being there. It's not always clear where that character is going to take me. Or where I will take them.

I've been on projects before where there's no rehearsal, and you walk in on set and that's literally the first time you've ever played the character, and then I've had times where there's been three weeks of rehearsal. I like both.

I mean one of the weird things about TV and one of the things that some actors don't like but I kind of dig is that you never know where you're headed, I mean you never know what the writer might think of next.

My favorite part about working in theater is the rehearsal process. I absolutely love the rehearsal process. Working out the characters, figuring the character out, and the relationships between the different characters. I love all of that, which, unfortunately in film, you get very little opportunity to have.

You always have to create the character from the ground up.

For me the rehearsal period is the part I most enjoy. It's the creating of the story.

When I'm breaking in a character like Jessica Jones, I have this amazing opportunity to create her backstory. It's all of the work that happens before I'm ever on camera... Writing 'Bonfire' was like doing all of that fun stuff; it was like 300 pages of prep work.

When we don't have all the details about our characters, we have to make it up to fill in all the details. So, for me, writing and acting go hand in hand.

As far as the creative side, the more I do this, the more I know that it's all about the writing. We don't always celebrate that enough, but without the writing, you can't do much. You got on a film sometimes, and it's sort of half-written, and they expect and think that the actor's job is to bring the extra part and the good part. It's not.

I have a journal, and every character that I play, I write as the character: how I feel about things and how I'm going to play it.

I think sometimes you can think up a story, but it's because you're comfortable doing that, but when you're an actor, one of the things that you have to do is take yourself out of your comfort zone.

I never do any research for my roles.

There's nothing more liberating about starting with something that is not written. You pretty much create the history of that character and that character's life story.

Now there are certain things you have to prepare - like dialect and special skills. But in the moment, interaction between two characters on the page doesn't need - for me, I don't need to prepare that.

I think back story can help guide your choices, but when you're playing a scene, you're not making choices; you're just intuitive.

If I'm practicing making up what the characters will do, it's never good. In fact, when I catch myself doing that, I try to get rid of that section, and try and let them start making the decisions.

As an actor, I like as much time with the material as possible and given the opportunity, time spent with the other actors in the scene. But that is a rare luxury in working in any TV series.

A novel is utterly your own creation, a very private process. I think of a novel as a noun and a screenplay as a verb. In a novel, very little needs to happen; you can explore a person's memories and thoughts and fantasies. In a screenplay, it's all action; you must push the story on.

Creating a character and living truthfully through her is a whole different ball game. It's all part of the same person but it's a much newer medium for me.

I'm consistently blown away by 'Mad Men.' Having spent so much time in the writers' room, I'm cursed in that anytime I watch something, I'm always calculating what the writers are up to.

I'm not the kind of actor that would know what my character had for breakfast last Tuesday.

I always find that it's when a script is not detailed, then I have to do more work as an actor.