Bill Hader Quotes

As actors, you do have to be aware of your audience. You can't act in a vacuum, even if that audience isn't exactly present with you.

A stage actor has to be 10% aware of the audience as he's performing.

In theater, you're playing characters. You believe you're somebody else, and you're acting.

People often argue about this. Obviously one of the skills in performance is acting, and you can't expect every Romeo to really be in love with their Juliet!

One of the skills you have to master in theater is the ability to make the audience believe that things that aren't there are there - just like when you're acting against CGI. Also, in a theater, the people in the back row can't see the whites of your eyes. Or your lips moving as you deliver dialogue.

As I told you, from the time I was fifteen, I thought the theater was too much involved with actors trying to make the audience love them, being over emotional.

In film, you're always using your tools, your body, your voice, your emotions, but onstage, you use them in a different way.

I think there is no better training than being onstage because here's the thing: the theater requires you to act with your whole body. I think acting with your whole body gives you a root, and you can build from there.

The audience basically likes complex characters, and bringing out the complexities is the actor's job. The audience doesn't have the script, the actor does.

I had always heard that theatre is for 'serious' actors but after actually having rehearsed day in and day out, I realize how challenging it is.

There is a drama queen in me, as I love acting, and I used to stand in front of the mirror and act since my childhood.

Real acting is about giving people an insight into a person, letting the audience in.

I think for acting on stage and in film, one informs the other. Obviously, they require really different kinds of discipline and really different kinds of work. It's more along the same continuum, for me.

With acting, there are a lot of subtleties and non-verbals involved. If someone is over there, getting eaten by a shark, there's a non-verbal way of how to act that. There's a certain nuance to acting that does not come intuitively to me. It's something I still have to learn.

I want to break into the acting industry. It's something I have a great deal of respect for; it's a passion of mine. It's so amazing, the differences between acting and being an athlete, but the one commonality is they both evoke emotion in the viewer. And those emotions are real. So I think that's pretty cool.

Sometimes I think of movie acting as advanced pretend.

Theater is about language, so characters have to define themselves through language for an audience.

Good actors, you always know what they're thinking. That's why they're good actors.

If you really do want to be an actor who can satisfy himself and his audience, you need to be vulnerable. You must reach the emotional and intellectual level of ability where you can go out stark naked, emotionally, in front of an audience.

I enjoy playing characters where the silence is loud.

When you think about Broadway, you think broad and big, but the fact is there are so many plays that are very intimate, but fill a 1,500-seat house. Plays like 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?' have deep moments of silence and intimacy to them.

I found out was, by the rhythm of my chewing, how I chewed fast, slow or what have you, I could tell the audience what my character was thinking and feeling.

An actor should be able to create the universe in the palm of his hand.

Movie acting is about covering the machinery. Stage acting is about exposing the machinery. In cinema, you should think the actor is playing himself, if he's that good. It looks very easy. It should. But it's not, I assure you.

I think if you're an actor, then you can work on stage - but if you've never done it before, you're going to have picked up a few things that you're going to need to change when you're working on stage.