Ed Helms Quotes

I do love doing films; I love going out and creating different characters for each film, and not having to be stuck with one role for many, many years. It's a creative liberty that I love.

Obviously, I play a villain in 'Downton Abbey'. As an actor, you want to get a variety of roles, so to be offered the part of Joe, it was perfect.

I would have loved to have been in 'Bottle Rocket' to take over Owen Wilson's character Dignan, because he's just awesome and amazing. I would have loved to have been in 'The Darjeeling Limited' maybe. I think that would have been a good one to be in.

Films are really cool because, every couple months, or however many times you can get a job because there's a lot of luck involved in that, you're playing a different character.

Wardrobe is - in films, I could say it's a good half of the acting. You get the right rags on, they'll talk for you.

On 'Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,' I spent two or three months learning how to ride a motorcycle. I wasn't really riding the motorcycle in 98 percent of the movie, but the shots of me getting on and off had to look like I had been doing it for years and years.

It isn't that easy to drop character, especially when you shoot for 12 to 16 hours a day for six months.

When I did 'Kapoor & Sons,' I had a prosthetic look. It would take me six-and-a-half hours daily for 20, 25 days.

There are only three reasons to do a movie: the cast, the director, the role. Like I say, you live in a minute of screen time, but to prepare for the minute takes much more than a day. You'd better be excited about what those moments are, even if they're the hardest moments. Or the smallest.

I think I fully commit myself to any role to the extent to which I can. In other words there's some roles that maybe it's just not there, in other words on the page. You know, I mean your job is you need to play the governor and that's what you do. I mean I'm not going to stay up all night if I'm playing a functional role. And I've played a couple of functional roles. And so I'm not going to do anything other, look he's a functional guy. He says hey mister, you forgot your hat.

What I love in working on film is just working with actors. It's one thing to write scenes alone over a keyboard and to imagine the actions and reactions in your head, but it's a completely other thing to hear actors speaking your words, to see their bodies bringing the fullness of emotion, need, desire and pain to life right in front of you. It's amazing.

Although I could be wrong. If Roland Emmerich's thinking about doing that at some point, I'd be glad to don the long hair again. But sometimes you can just go a little bit further out with something you're only going to be doing for a short run

The scene [in The Hangover] where the tiger actually pops up behind us, that's actually a Jim Henson tiger puppet. The Jim Henson Company actually supplied that tiger. And it's really cool. Its entire face moves. It has like all these little motors in its eyebrows and cheeks and mouth. It was amazing.

I think you approach a part the same way and just find out in what's making them tick and who they are. In a movie like this you may have a little less time and few dialogue scenes and exposition scenes for your character to really get that across, and so I wanted to be able to convey that she's not somebody who's just punching a clock but she has this weird emotional investment in her job to where she does get quite myopic and that's what makes her relentless.

Not only is acting more than a part-time job, it's more than a full-time job. It's a full-time obsession.

I definitely want to do films. To see a character out from beginning to end in a matter of a hundred somewhat pages and then move on to the next role, is fascinating.

The delineation between the actor and his part is a practical matter. When the camera runs, you want the actor to be the character.

I have a great deal of respect for the craft, I don't know how much respect it has for me. But it's a precision process. Doing it on stage would be, I think, terrifying. Doing it on film has its own difficulties, because film is not conducive to spontaneity. You might have a run through and get a few chuckles at eight o'clock in the morning, but you don't keep laughing at the same thing all day long.

I didn't mention the tooth thing to anyone until it became clear that...we started to discuss just taking it out of the movie [The Hangover] because we couldn't find anything that worked and they couldn't afford to do a full like digital effect. So that's when I called my dentist and it worked out.

It's closer to just acting in a film because it was a six-month commitment. We got to fly all over the world.

There's usually not a lot of rehearsal when you do films.

Working on camera is a different ballgame in the sense that it's far more intimate work, but the basics and the foundations of being able to create something that isn't necessarily your own instincts - is a character that you have inside your head - whether you're talking about television or film or theater, that still has to be the grounding work.

I think Aaron [Sorkin] did a remarkable job of plucking Andy [Hertzfeld] out of [Steve] Jobs' story, to perhaps reflect back on Steve a sense of maybe some things that were missing in Steve's life. Andy, just by nature, is one of these straight shooters.

"Bruce" was an Eddie Murphy film, so there was a whole different vibe, working on that film, as opposed to working on a [Adam] Sandler film, which I'd done a few of. First of all, there were tons of kids running around. I'm surprised I ever had a kid after doing that film.

I love my job, I love being an actor and stepping into the shoes of different characters and exploring their lives. It's enriched my life extremely. I've learned more about myself and the ways of life through being an actor.