Jim Sturgess Quotes

I think that's how any actor would make their performance convincing: by bringing an element of themselves into the character.

I think I take away a naturalistic approach to acting from doing 'The Larry Sanders Show,' a way to put aside acting and just exist in the world of what's being handed to me.

Your duty as an actor is to try to make it as real as possible.

If I was an actor, it would be like a part that was me. It has to be real to me. I have to make it mine. I really enjoy taking a song I feel that way about, and sometimes it can take a long time to come up with just the right touch. I think that's really my greatest talent, interpreting.

With the type of actor I am, which includes really diving into a role and making it as real as possible, there's nothing better than working in a real environment on location. It forces you to feel what the character's feeling, and it allows you to live in the space of the character.

I love acting. I just love it. It's in my bones. I remember when I was a kid, I watched an interview with Dennis Hopper talking about Jimmy Dean on the set of Rebel Without A Cause. Jimmy said to him, "If you've got to cry in a scene, you've got to cry. Make it real." And that's all that I believe in.

As an actor, I function from a place of compassion and empathy - you have to believe 100 percent what your character is doing, because otherwise it will look like it's not real.

At some point, you have to disconnect, if the obsession with playing a real person gets in the way of the movie at large. At the same time, we're all interested, as actors in trying to get as close to the real thing as we can, and whatever you can do in order to create that transformation feels fun and, for me, the furthest I can get away from myself is fun. It's all part of the costume, the accent, and all that stuff. It's about trying to get close without it being a detriment to the point of view of the story that you're trying to tell.

Actually I want to scare away method actors because it's a pain. It's like, 'Come on, what are you doing? It's not real. What are you doing? Oh, you're really brooding. Okay, good. Go to your trailer. I'll see you in an hour.'

Now if I cry on screen I think it's mint. Because I think that's how that person would feel at that time. And if it doesn't, then it just doesn't happen.

When you're acting on TV, you want to keep it real.

Some people think that acting's about being somebody else and I don't. I think this is how I would be given the same circumstances. And I do it for my own enjoyment.

A lot of filmmakers and actors say, "It's so important to bring an authenticity to the role," blah, blah, blah. But then it's interesting because you're also trying to be somebody else, and viewers are going to associate you with that, so I don't think it really has an answer.

I prefer not to wink out from behind the character as myself, saying to the audience, "It's just me here, right, guys?" Peter Sellers is my model, and he didn't do that - he wore his character from head to toe.

I've been in scenarios as an actor where you have to manufacture an emotion that's not really there, but it wasn't hard with Halle because she's a great person and very beautiful, so it ain't a tough job at the end of the day.

I hate the word "method acting." It's just so silly. You hear people going, "Yeah I'm a method actor." I'm like, "So what happens if you're playing a period film or something? You're in the Second World War. And what happens when your mom calls you on your phone? Do you go, 'Oh! What is this strange talking brick device?'" No. It's stupid. But you do everything you can to get in that mindset.

Method acting has had a major influence both in writing through the eyes of other people, and seeing through the eyes of other people, trying to address different ideas in a way that would go beyond preaching to the choir.

There's a method aspect to Campbell Scott character and he really wants to get into his character and he wants to cast to go on a fast so that by the time the play opens nobody's eaten in three days because he wants the audience to feel the pain from the stage.

It was good but it was just a tiny bit uncomfortable because it was a day of lying in the bushes and I think I got a major muscle thing going on there! But it was good. It was fun. That is one of the things you get to do in film that you don't do, or that I don't do, in real life. I can't speak for Dermot [Mulroney]! But it was fun.

I don't worry so much about the audience. I want them very much to be involved and enjoy the movie, but I try to just inhabit the character in a full way, where I can create a personal stake.

One of the great tools we use in acting is the idea of immediacy, that the audience gets to see you witness something apparently for the first time, so you create a lot of tools to kind of trick yourself into making it appear something is happening for the first time.

It's so easy to disappear into your character because there isn't all this fuss around you, and we keep a closed set, and closed off to all crew members, even, unless we're cut. A lot of times, you're doing a scene in a movie and there are literally 35 people standing behind the camera all waiting to do their job, but here they have to be off the stage. On The Office, it is very much just the actors, a cameraman and a boom operator, like a real documentary, like we really are being documented.

The core of the film is usually something very emotional and something that feels really real that you can relate to, it's not like done in a false way. You know a lot of films will treat emotion falsely and you can sense that very quickly.

I felt a gravitational pull to the material so that there's a certain element of acting that's not really necessary. I've really liked this in foreign movies before or I've observed others working with them and I've noticed that there's a method that goes on where the actors try and get the children, like the child actor, to interact with them in a real way. It seems like you're the adult trying to get the kid to fall in love with him.

How as an actress are you meant to inhabit other people if you haven't lived? How are you meant to play someone who gets the bus to work or has a part-time job or whatever if I've never experienced any of it myself or if I haven't been to school? How does that make me someone that people can relate to? I don't think it's possible really.