Sean Hayes Quotes

I don't think you can ever completely transform yourself on film, but if you do your job well, you can make people believe that you're the character you're trying to be.

Every little thing that people know about you as a person impedes your ability to achieve that kind of terrific suspension of disbelief that happens when an audience goes with an actor and character he's playing.

You want to try and bring a character to life in an honest a way as you possibly can. It doesn't matter whether he's a doctor, an actor, a car salesman or a captain of a starship. If you can bring truth and honesty to that character, then your audience will believe you.

I don't want to know about the lives of other actors and I don't want people to know too much about me. If we don't know about the private lives of other actors, that leaves us as clean slates when it comes to playing characters. That's the point, they can create these other characters and I can believe them.

I want people to believe me when I play a part and they are less apt to if they know a lot about me and have associations about me.

You never want to just be outrageous for outrageous' sake 'cause then it doesn't work, and it's not believable. You want to be as true to whatever character you're playing.

When I'm doing a role the one thing I ask is 'Is this believable? am I being truthful?'

My job is to try and present the most fully-rounded character that I can, and bring a performance that people believe in.

Every role you do is kind of a side of yourself. That's why they give you the part.

I think every role you take on, you should take on the responsibility of doing the best representation of that person or that character or that role. When it is a human being that has actually existed, and it is a person that people know of, yeah, you feel an even more amount of pressure to do a good job.

There is no way you can get people to believe you on screen if they know who you really are through television.

What I try to do often when I'm acting and what I like when I'm seeing good acting is how authentic it is. How true is this to what I know of the world that's been created for me? The ultimate test for me is, like, if I heard a clip of it on the radio, I'd like the audience not to know if I'm acting.

There are so many examples of talented actors working today, no matter how they live their private lives. I'm lucky that people believe me when I'm in character.

That's the thing about acting - you can't fake it.

There is a large element of me in every role I do.

In my work, I want to convince people that I'm that character. If they know everything about Lesley Manville - private life, all of that stuff - it doesn't help. So the kind of anonymity I enjoy is key.

I think that you have to find a piece of yourself in every role you play. If you don't believe what you're doing, you cannot expect anyone else to believe it.

It's challenging to take on something else that is not you and make it very real and have others be able to associate with it. It's wonderful to provoke thought.

As an actor, the biggest compliment you can get, in my book is for someone to believe that you're the character.

I'm lucky that people believe me when I'm in character.

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.

The role of an actor is to make every character believable.

That's, to me, the ultimate goal - to disappear inside another character and bring them so fully to life that I've convinced other human beings that it's a real person.

There is a lot of myself in every character that I play.

Whenever you have a character in which one of his defining qualities is his sexuality, it's always challenging, because you don't want to bring in someone who's going to play that in a phony way.