Greg Mottola Quotes

I want really badly to just be funny in a movie but be close to myself.

I felt more comfortable playing other people than being myself, when I was a kid. And then, the tables turned. Through my performances, I've become more comfortable with who I am, and then I just bring more of myself into the people that I play.

In every character you play, as much as you hate to admit it as an actor, but there's an element of you that you bring to it.

When I was at Upright Citizens Brigade, I would pretend to be a sad, drunk rapper.

I play a character every day of my life, and I don't want to play a character as myself. They can judge me as an actress, not as a person. I'm not a spokeswoman for Anna.

I cannot be a character in a bad movie. I can't be.

It's the actors who are prepared to make fools of themselves who are usually the ones who come to mean something to the audience.

I approach a comedy the same way I do a drama. I try to make it as real as possible.

I don't think I'm like any of the characters I've played - they're all really far from who I am.

I do not want to play a character who is exactly like me.

You can spend a bit of yourself when you give yourself to a character. At the end of a job, you have to remind yourself who and what you are.

Like, that was weird in 'Hamlet 2,' because I played myself there, fully myself, but then I realized, 'Oh, I'm not playing myself. I'm some weird version of myself.' So as an actress, you're always playing something, I don't even know who I am, how could I become me? I don't know what that is.

The best advice my dad ever gave me is that acting is believing. Acting is not acting. It isn't putting on a face and dancing around in a mask. It's believing that you are that character and playing him as if it were a normal day in the life of that character.

I was like the class clown in school so I guess I would say I did like the attention. In church I did a lot of plays, my mother made me play characters, do a lot of drama and acting, trying to become someone else. So it helped me create who I am, to create Snoop Dogg.

I couldn't be 'Johnny' in front of a camera in acting jobs and behind the camera I like to be 'Michael.' With directing, you can't do it by halves. There's a lot of reflection, and I have found that I, as 'Michael,' thrive on it. It's lovely coming home and feeling that stuff from a day's work as myself.

One of the things I love about acting is that it reveals a certain something about yourself, but it doesn't reveal your own personal story.

Before I was known, I would go on stage and pretend I was other people. Once I pretended I was mentally handicapped. It was really wrong. One time I was a bad magician. And one time I pretended I was a Christian comic.

I love to act and put on a show, but you're playing a character all the time. For music, it's really just me being myself.

Drama and comedy, to me, are all about being surprising, coherent, and true, all at once.

Acting is acting.

An actor is someone who pretends to be somebody else. A movie star is somebody who pretends that somebody else is them.

I love a mask. It's why I've got a thing about good writing. When you're acting, you're going into someone else's work. You're behind his words; it's not you.

The more ridiculous the character is, the more sincerity you have to bring to it.

Acting is way of making yourself exist.

You have a dramatic portion of your television program and you treat it dramatically, and then you have a comedic portion of your program, and you treat it differently. Why do you change who are between the two pieces? You're the same person. Just go.