Matt Bomer Quotes

Well, first of all, you read the script a million times. Because what the script gives you are given circumstances. Given circumstances are all the facts of your character.

For me, I always have to establish a reality for the character. In very actor-y terms, you just have to understand his reality.

When I look at a character, whether he's good or bad, one scene or 10 scenes, I just have to find my way in.

With any role I play, I find out what the human problem is first.

As actors, you don't actually need to know the future of the character. You just need to know the backgrounds.

My school of thought with going into a character is that you have to understand where they come from, and you have to empathize with them.

I do build my own backstory as an actor. It's important to know where your characters have come from in order to know where they're going - in order to exist in that state of being.

Some actors - myself included - like to know where your character's going: you like to know what the arc is for the character so that you can plan where you're going to give beats for this, that, and the other and give the audience what they want. But on 'Homeland,' you do the opposite.

What happens with every role, you have to trick yourself, you have to creatively find ways to explore the mental state of your character.

You have to play the logic of a character.

As an actor, you want to be able to move your character forward into new ground, but also it's really interesting to go backwards and unpeel those layers and the interesting elements of what your character is and what informs the decisions that you make so that you can have as much meat to work with.

I always approach any character I do as being right.

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.

When I act, I try to understand the character, why she's behaving like that.

As an actor, you have to find reasons why your character made her decisions, and you have to empathise with her.

Denzel had made it apparent that he wanted me to bring my own interpretation of 'Cory'. I was definitely aware of Courtney B. Vance's performance in the original production, as well as that of Chris Chalk, who performed the role onstage with my cast back in 2010.

There's no set rule, but when you look at the script, you start thinking about this person and how to create this human being on screen. You dig deeper into a script.

Every time I get a role, or the opportunity to explore a role, I look at it, and I think, 'What is the story we're trying to tell here?'

I try to think what the character is thinking. Then, hopefully, I begin to feel it. I act and react not because I'm recalling a dog killed by a fire engine, but because I'm concentrating on what the character is going through.

Sometimes the director will want you to write about the character, sometimes he'll want you to live in the location that the character is from or something like that, but I don't usually make a lot of notes or anything like that.

I only have an awareness of what I'm trying to achieve as an actor and what my job as the character is to service.

Ultimately, the idea of acting is to understand the people you're playing, and then where they're coming from is not so mystifying. You've got to detox a bit after, though.

I locate that special problem in a character and then try to understand it. That's the genesis of all my work.

In the work that I normally do, you have a whole script, a whole arc, that you play. And I do believe a good actor will play every bit of information they're given.

It's kind of up to the actor to deconstruct the scene and deconstruct the character and figure out how to make it real. That's what I love about this job: It's sort of a puzzle each time, and figuring that out is sort the key, whether I'm playing a cop or a killer.