Jonathan Dee Quotes

Actors, their greatest tool, their greatest resource is imagination. You can take things, power objects, you can recruit your dreams, you can access your memories and get there. So the idea is not to act but to just be.

Part of the fun of acting is the research, finding out about other people.

That's what acting is. You're pretending to be someone else.

In acting process, it's very difficult to explain. It's something very intimate, very private.

I take my time to get into the mindset of the character and say my lines. I really have to be the person that I am playing.

Actors have to make you believe that it's happening for the first time and all that jazz and make it human and at the same time entertain you.

I'm a task-oriented actor. A pretender. And I try to invent my process anew each time I make a new project. So I frown on any method.

Keats himself spoke about how Shakespeare was capable of erasing himself completely from the characters he had created. As an actor, that is what I'm trying to do.

In all my characters, I try to find an iota of myself, and in Castle, I found a lot. He gets away with a lot, so that's fun.

When I do a character, I try to base it on someone I have met or an experience I've had.

I love acting and really taking on another person, another life.

It's sort of the most important thing for acting, is to listen to the person you're dealing with.

That's why I enjoy acting: getting in the mind of someone else.

You have to like the characters you play.

I just love to be able to actually build a character.

I started improvising the Cliff character, based on someone I grew up with.

Every time you get on a stage or in front of a camera, the whole exercise is about imagination. You're constantly depicting something that doesn't exist, and trying to find the reality of it. Once you settle on that premise, everything else is a matter of degrees.

With any role, you're extending yourself and acting out things that never happened to you.

The more and more I work with really great actors, the more it's about opening yourself up to what they bring.

I love an acting challenge, and I love getting to sit down with my script and do all my drama work.

I think I've spent so much time playing characters that are so far away from me and learning how to technically build and how to technically put something on top of you.

Acting is an imaginative leap, really, isn't it? And imaginations prosper in different circumstances.

The first time I thought I should be an actor was in school. I thought, 'At least this is something for which I won't have to study.' But I've realised that an actor needs to be constantly unsure about what he's doing and about what's going on around him. The moment you think you've nailed it, you're dead.

My approach as an actor has always been the same, in that the greatest gift that you're ever going to have is your imagination because you're not going to have all life experiences. So you draw on things that are sort of close to it but you spend your time expanding on it or drawing something specific on whatever your situation is.

I don't have any training as an actor, but I guess I'm an intense pretender. When you read something over and over, it gets into you a little bit. You can't help but begin to feel it, even if you're a healthy person as I think I am.