Octavia Spencer Quotes

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

As an actor, our very palette is one of imagination. So it is a walk onto an empty space and then imagine the world beyond it is what we do.

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

I find it easier to play someone who is so far from me because you create someone - you build this person based on the story and the script, with the director.

Acting is contained - you act for three months, then leave it - but writing is the act of creation. Writing is dangerous.

If you have a very good concept of your character, you can snap into it.

What I'm really trying to do is create unique characters.

You have to start from a place of trying to create a character.

Every time when I start preparing my character for a movie, I always try to make up and create my own background story for the role in order to fill it with life.

As far as the creative side, the more I do this, the more I know that it's all about the writing. We don't always celebrate that enough, but without the writing, you can't do much. You got on a film sometimes, and it's sort of half-written, and they expect and think that the actor's job is to bring the extra part and the good part. It's not.

Whenever you have a role where you don't get to know anything about the character, you have to invent it yourself. You have to feel like it came from somewhere.

You have more creative freedom with writing, in certain ways, because you can create everything that happens. But, as an actor you also have creative freedom because you don't so much focus on what has to move the story along, and only on how your character is reacting to situations.

I just love to act. I like to get away, totally play a different character, someone you can get really involved in knowing. I've gotten really involved in some characters and written down little summaries of where they live and what their families are like.

I'm not the kind of actor that would know what my character had for breakfast last Tuesday.

It's your job as an actor to fill out the blanks. I love doing that. To fill in the bones.

In terms of the character itself, I can't really say that I find anything really difficult. I enjoy the character so much I don't perceive difficulty in trying to be him. It's just a matter of how do we get there.

Characters don't belong to anyone, not even the person who plays them.

I like to build a character, trying to stretch my imagination as far to the walls of my brain as I can to come up with something that feels truthful and feels real - as close to the skin as I can get it.

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

The process of creation goes on all the time. When I get through, I feel I know what the character will do in every situation. But the building up of the part is not mechanical or deliberate. It grows out of the text.

My characters are fictional. I get ideas from real people, sometimes, but my characters always exist only in my head.

I'll often dream about characters before I start writing their stories.

To create characters, one must build background. And one of the tools we use is improvisation.

You know, working as an actor, I'm always working within my own imagination.

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