Robert Picardo Quotes

I think right after 'Up in the Air' everyone wanted me to play the girl from 'Up in the Air,' and it took a little while for people to think of me as an actress from a film that they liked instead of just that character.

I don't mind the audience identifying me with Red.

Playing a character for four years, in people's minds, that's who you are.

You do something, like, something like 'Psych' for long enough, it's tough to shake up people's preconceptions of who you are as a performer.

People had been so attached to the Diane [Cheers] character that audiences and producers found it difficult to think of me in any other terms. It took some time before people would consider me for other parts.

I think 40 years ago, it would have been a little bit different because people had a tendency to think the actor was their part. I do find people who, all of a sudden, realize who is sitting in the restaurant and the first thing they react on is not necessarily, "There's that actor," but it's, "There's that killer guy."

Realistically, there is a danger, of course, when you're going into someone's living room as the same guy every week. But I don't fear it because, I mean, there's really nothing I can do about it. I can try to combat it through the work, and maybe make sure I don't do Sheldon 2.0 in any other projects. But it's just really hard for me to find any negative side effects from this experience.

No, I don't have to practice that grunt. You just do it. Once you're in character, you're in character. You don't sit there purposely thinking, Well, I'll grunt here, or I'll groan there.

The essence of acting is seeing the world from another point of view. That's what acting is.

Having been Scully for such a long time, I have to prove myself in other roles.

You want the actors to disappear into roles and stay under the radar, and that gets harder when someone is known for their actual personality, or who they seem to be.

As an actor, when you're actually trying to embody what it would be like to just know that everyone's at your beck and call, it's quite a thing to absorb what that might be like and what that would do.

When you get the role, it's 'cause you know exactly how to play it, and they know that the way you're playing it is exactly what they want. I never go with a role and say that I need to change anything about it. Otherwise, I wouldn't take it.

I think it serves the purpose of the film if the premise is that you're unsure of me because you've only ever really seen me play villains.

There comes a point when you've exhausted your opportunities playing good guys. I've been around long enough, I think I'm entitled to explore a bit. But what I saw there was an opportunity to play a character different from what the audience's expectation was. A chance to take their crude experience of me - of my iconography, if you will - and turn it on its ear at an appropriate juncture in the film to be useful to the process of telling the story.

It's fashionable for modern actors to talk about getting 'inside' a character. But you can't get to the inside without getting the outside right first.

I'm actually a thin serious person but I play fat and funny, but only for the movies.

I think audiences are a lot more intelligent than what we give them credit for and understand that an actor is playing a role and that doesn't mean he can't play different types of roles.

I really do think that every time you play a role well, you are in danger of being identified with that role until the next big thing comes along.

I think the scariest thing to me is to think that somebody would only associate me with one character and that that's all that I would get to play.

I really become the characters when I'm writing them. I'll become one or two of them more than others, I'm consistent that way.

One of the great tools we use in acting is the idea of immediacy, that the audience gets to see you witness something apparently for the first time, so you create a lot of tools to kind of trick yourself into making it appear something is happening for the first time.

I'm an actor. I'm trying to be the character and do what they're doing.

Movies are a powerful medium. People think you are your character. I've had plenty of people who think I'm Drago. They don't know about the chemical engineering part of my personality. They don't know about the geek part of my personality.

The best thing about acting is when you're playing a scene and you actually become your character and lose yourself in that moment. That's when you know you've been succeeded at what you've worked very hard to accomplish in your profession. Those are the truly thrilling moments.