Philip Seymour Hoffman Quotes

Real-life people are often the hardest to play, people that you recreate who have actually lived, because you have to live up to people's knowledge of those characters.

Portraying Mozart is a scary task. Whenever I'm asked to portray actual historic figures, it comes with extra accountability. Not just to your director and playwright, but to the man himself and the beloved persona that the public forms.

It's always very daunting to play someone who actually existed. You have to honor that, and be specific and accurate and try to make people believe that you're that guy, which is really hard.

You're playing a character in a drama who happens to be based on someone who existed. It's never going to 'be' that person, but it's based on someone well-known, and you want to create enough of that person for it not to be a distraction.

Playing a real person, it does add an extra level of thoughtfulness. You're portraying someone who actually existed, so instead of saying, like, 'OK, I think this would make the scene better,' it's more a question of, 'What do I think the real Jeffrey Dahmer would do?'

Obviously, as an actor, when you re playing a real person, it is an extra challenge.

Directors approach me for doing 'strong' women characters which, as an actor, increases a sense of responsibility to give my 100 per cent and even more for the faith they entrust on me.

It's interesting trying to make something as truthful as possible, but playing someone who is still alive is quite a weird thing.

It's challenging to play a real-life character because you know that it existed in the history and you have certain parameters to follow and stay within.

If you're playing a fictional character, you can create a character, you can sort of take certain liberties. And when you're playing a real person who's actually standing there watching you, you know, it's - you do feel a weight. You know, you feel an obligation to not only be - to give the best performance that you can, but to make sure that you represent this person.

To me it is harder to play a real person, but when you do it and you feel good about it and the person feels good about it, I think that's doubly rewarding. So the challenge is greater, the risk is greater, but the reward is greater as well.

If you're playing any real person, live or dead, you certainly have a responsibility to produce that reputation in some way.

I think every role you take on, you should take on the responsibility of doing the best representation of that person or that character or that role. When it is a human being that has actually existed, and it is a person that people know of, yeah, you feel an even more amount of pressure to do a good job.

It's a great challenge to get to play a real-life character. Every actor would love to get a chance, at least once in his life, to play a real-life character.

There is always pressure playing a real living person and even pressure developing a character from scratch.

Whenever you're going to play a real person, you run the risk of well, everybody in the world kind of has an image of what that person is and who he should be and so you really have to do your homework.

When you're playing someone who really lived, you carry a burden, a burden to be accurate. But it's one that you have to let go of ultimately.

For me, the challenge of a period film is that, unlike a contemporary film where the character can be very free-form when it comes to the acting, there's a burden to acting in a period film because you have to stay within the character's historical background and the gestures of certain periods.

The interesting thing is, when you play a real-life character or someone based in a book, you always come up against people's preconceptions of what they have in their heads.

'On the Road' is another one of those, a film in which the audience has a very clear idea of who they think your character is, so you know you are asking for it. But that's the challenge.

If you're playing the a historical character that's in the public consciousness, then obviously you've got to make an effort to look like that person and there's a huge amount of historical record there that you have to kind of comply to.

When I told people I was going to be doing the movie and the voice of Dobby, they were kind of awestruck, the people who knew about Harry Potter. I felt rather guilty that I didn't really understand the scale of the job I was about to take on. Now, I am well aware of what I'm doing, and actually, it feels a very serious acting responsibility.

When you play someone who is an iconic figure you can't go into it lightly.

I have a rule: I will not alter the basic history of a real-life character to suit our fictional needs in a big way.

It's interesting to play a real-life person who has already been a character on 'Saturday Night Live.'