Abbie Cornish Quotes

To act, no matter how the character is, you have to love and have compassion for the character you're playing.

It helps to be more interested in other people than you are in yourself. Inhabiting other characters is what I do.

I like all my characters in one way or another, or at least I understand them.

When you're playing a character, as an actor or actress, you can't judge them for what they do. You really have to find what is in them that you have compassion for and fall in love with that character, regardless of what they do or how they behave.

You have to have sympathy for and an empathy with a character in order to play them.

You've got to empathize with every character you play.

Good characters don't believe they're bad. As long as you as an actor believe in them and try to understand them, it's not hard to have empathy and sympathy.

Anytime you take on a character... you just have to find the parts of the character that you can understand.

I think any role you need to play not so much transforms but I like to think of it as understanding the psychology of another character.

A character has to believe in himself, so I have to find a way to believe in them. Or at least sympathize to a degree.

It helps to write as the character that I am trying to be, and try to journal every day as them. Once I've already recorded thoughts as this person, it's easier to just flip back through and be like, 'Oh, yeah, this is what she's thinking; this is what she's feeling.'

You can't understand a character intellectually, you have to become one with its emotional core.

I don't think you have to like a character, but if you can understand why they do what they do, or the position they're in or why they make certain choices, then you can get behind them.

I think it's necessary to identify with anything - with any character you play, there's got to be something in common, so you can link up to that person, even if it's like one tiny thing. But it's equally fun to play somebody completely different, and trying to find what that thing is to make it.

It's so funny, you go to acting school thinking you're going to learn how to be other people, but really it taught me how to be myself. Because it's in understanding yourself deeply that you can lend yourself to another person's circumstances and another person's experience.

Literature sucks you into another psyche. So the creation of empathy necessarily influences how you'll behave to other people.

If you're playing the bad guy, you have to find what you like about them.

I have a lot of compassion for human beings in life experiences, so I allow myself to feel what these characters are feeling and don't have a problem accepting that.

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.

It's good to have to put yourself in someone else's skin. It's all-consuming.

The story is a machine for empathy. In contrast to logic or reason, a story is about emotion that gets staged over a sequence of dramatic moments, so you empathize with the characters without really thinking about it too much. It is a really powerful tool for imagining yourself in other people's situations.

Most good actors have a huge intelligence about the human condition and a real open heart to different kinds of people and behavior.

As an actor, if you decide that someone is bad... you can't play bad, because even the worst person doesn't think what they're doing is bad.

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.

When you take on a role, even if the character is somebody that you are dissimilar to, you have to identify with the role and look for an emotional connection even if there is not a biographical one.