Eli Roth Quotes

A lot of actors are just like la la la - they're never really connected and then they're in the scene and then boom. They're looking you in the eyes and they're just really focused.

I always let my husband read the script so he knows what's about to happen to his wife. When I played Cheryl Strayed in Wild, I'd get really mad about certain things, I'd say really profound things, and I'd curse out of nowhere. He'd say, "Are you you, or are you Cheryl?"

As an actor, anything that you have to help get you into character is helpful.

I'm certainly not one of those actors who remain in a dark place the entire time in order to be doing the scene. I sort of come in and out of it. It can be to the detriment of my performance sometimes!

I'm not the kind of actor that can go completely cold into an emotional scene. I have to transport myself emotionally by whatever means possible, and that basically means you carry the situation with you all week, all episode or all day beforehand.

With films, you completely immerse yourself in a character, get into who they are, live it and then release it.

Sometimes you can just step into the character, and you get all your feelings and emotions just from sympathizing with her and being her. But then, other times, you just have to resort back to anything that you've been through in your own life and try to play that.

When you have to get into the character each morning, give it your voice, your face, it was torture.

As an actor, you gain weight, you lose weight, you change your hair color, and you make changes physically and emotionally to be able to understand the character.

I did a film a few years ago where I gained a lot of weight for it. I was happy to do that because it was called for in the script.

I like to be in character a good few hours before I arrive for filming.

I've dealt with a few method actors, and I don't know if should say this, but I think it's a bunch of nonsense. I think it's film acting and you just have to be on when the camera is rolling.

I always try to do something very different with each character because that's why I like to do this, because I can become someone else completely and it's fun.

As an actor, you hope to obtain this mind meld and sometimes I feel like I'm chasing a horse holding on to its tail and getting dragged, and other times I feel much more velcroed into the saddle. And I'm not the knower of which is better or best as a process, it's just as random as the weather in terms of what my subjective experience is.

It certainly helps, I think, with some actors to understand the process of acting. You see what extraordinary pressure they're under, there's a huge circus dedicated to a particular moment and they're got to deliver and it can help that you, even if empathetically alone, understand what they're doing.

She [Susan Lucci] was extraordinary. She wouldn't look at the scene until you walked in to rehearse it. It was amazing to me. That's the impression I got anyway.

My first day on set [Bad Santa 2] was with Billy [Bob Tornton] and it was a sex scene in a Christmas tree lot and you know in order to make it great for the audience you just have to go for it! It was our sort of our icebreaker. There is something very freeing and fun about just playing make believe and it's just over the top and hilarious so you just go for it.

You don't really prepare for a kissing scene.

When I say that the acting is sort of like a normal acting experience, I'm just talking about the interacting in actual scenes, like doing dialogue.

I don't think a lot of people really understand the commitment it takes to being a character that an actor in Hollywood would take to approaching a role that they're doing.

In the theater you rehearse in order to do the performance. And in the movies the rehearsal and the performance are kind of the same thing. You're figuring it out and hopefully the camera is pointed at you when you're doing it.

Acting is never really effortless, at least not for me. It requires a massive amount of work. But, there's definitely an added level of having to just create the whole thing again, every time. It's also a very exciting thing, to do that.

I don't think I could ever stop doing serious movies and just do comedies, or vice versa, but there is something cool about going to work everyday and you're just trying to make your friends laugh. That's nice work if you can get it, you know what I mean? It's different than going to work and knowing that I've gotta slap someone in the face today, and then I've gotta cry, and someone's gonna die, I've gotta get myself to that place.

That's one of my little expressions. I never really studied acting so I kind of kiddingly talk about "building your circle" and "mooding up," because I really didn't learn any technique.

You can lose your ability to play romantic scenes... you have to ensure that your mind is in the right place.