Boris Karloff Quotes

My great love is the stage because I do feel like it's the place where, if you're lucky and everything is firing in the right way, you have the greatest shot at being successful. I don't mean by getting great reviews, but I mean by finding the core fo the person that you're playing.

When you're an actor, you show up and it's wonderful because you're in the world of make-believe.

I want things to be characters and not me. Why would I want to play me?

The idea of transformation - playing something I'm not - is the bit I enjoy most about acting.

I think it's important I stay connected to every part of my personality. I play basketball. I rock climb. I paint. I'm a little bit scattered, but it's so I can convincingly play all these characters.

The great thing about acting is that you get to be a lot of different things in one lifetime. You get to explore different personalities and characters.

It's wonderful when you can play a character that pulls all sorts of strings inside of you and fills you emotionally.

It is joyous for any actor to enter other grounds of consciousness and thought. At the end of the day, we just all like dressing up and playing around.

The fun is getting to wear multiple disguises and getting to explore multiple personalities and bring them to life. So a movie career definitely affords me that.

It's so fun to play a villain. I get to tap into a side of myself I thought I never had.

That's part of the beauty of being an actress: you get to explore different facets of what it is to be a human being and what it is to explore different personalities, and actually, that's one of the things I love about it.

It's really fun to put yourself into a character - into shoes you wouldn't normally be in.

I've always wanted to play the villain. You get to be morally corrupt. You don't get to do that in real life.

Playing interesting characters makes me feel alive.

I always enjoyed being a villain more, probably because you get to do and say a lot of things you wouldn't do in real life.

I definitely play roles that are close to my persona. I was dying to be an actor, my whole life. I just always wanted to be someone else. Then, once I decided that I really thought I was pretty cool, I wanted to see myself.

That's the fun thing about making movies is that you get to do stuff. You get to be things, say things that you're not, kind of walk in someone else's shoes and play dress up and make believe. It's pretty cool.

As an artist, it's a great opportunity to play a character like this [Ugandan dictator Idi Amin in The Last King of Scotland]. And then, as a person, I had never been to the African continent. So, I knew, personally, it would reshape me.

When my oldest brother started acting. From there, I wanted to act myself. That's the long story short.

I played St. Jimmy on Broadway I sort of caught the acting bug. But I didn't want to go full-bore into it because I have a lot to learn.

It was only when I started making short films in college and I was looking for girls to play the me-ish parts that I thought, Well, maybe I'm just going to try doing this myself before somebody else comes in and handles it. For a long time my acting was just a marriage of convenience between me and these characters that I was writing.

Initially I started in theatre as a Shakespearean actress before film and television. I've always been an artistic child growing up and I knew I wanted to act for as long as I can remember.

People watch me when I get into these characters that I have in my head, so perhaps I should try acting. So I did.

One of the things that's awesome about being an actor is that you get to do stories, live lives and have experiences that you never could have even conceived of, and that's because you're living in another writer's imagination and another director's imagination.

There are definitely things about acting that have helped me growing up and finding myself, but there are also things that make it a bit more difficult. I guess I do allow myself to explore more when I know that, at the end of the day, if I really wanted to, I could just play a different person all day and be fine with that.