India Eisley Quotes

Acting is not acting. It isn't putting on a face and dancing around in a mask. It's believing that you are that character and playing him as if it were a normal day in the life of that character.

Acting is not just impersonating your character.

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

It was important to have a similar energy in my performance. To make the character too different would have just been about my ego because it didn't need to be drastically different.

I tend to get comfortable with the dialogue and find out who the person is in the script and try to hit that. People are sort of independent of their occupations and their pastimes. You don't play a politician or a fireman or a cowboy - you just play a person.

I hate acting when I see it. I don't want to feel it, I don't want to see it, I want to be taken away with the story - I don't want the actor's ego in front of me. That's what I try to live when I do the work.

You draw on whatever's relevant to the part you're playing; it makes it more personal.

For me as an actor, you always sort of want to bring yourself to a character in some way. You want to find a way to approach something in a way that's real and interesting, and also so there's some empathy there.

I think it's always easier to play parts that you have something concrete that you can relate to.

I don't think you can ever completely transform yourself on film, but if you do your job well, you can make people believe that you're the character you're trying to be.

The way I approach acting when there's a real life character, it's sort of like a Venn diagram. What I come up with is some amalgam of the two of us.

I think every actor injects some of his own personality into his parts. There's a great deal of myself in McCoy, a great deal of Bill in Kirk, and a great deal of Leonard in Spock!

As an actor, you can't just imitate someone. You have to get under her skin.

I started to view theatre like a spiritual experience. You're on stage saying somebody else's lines, but you're saying them with full commitment of being that person.

The actor's job is to put themselves in the shoes of the character they are trying to portray as truthfully as possible.

As an actor, you can do what you want with your role. That's why they hire you; to take the role and make it real.

In every character you play, as much as you hate to admit it as an actor, but there's an element of you that you bring to it.

If you can walk into a set and feel the reality of it, then immediately you're not having to work to bring yourself into the character.

I had an acting teacher tell me once that if you're playing a car salesman, you don't want to be an OK car salesman, you want to play the best car salesman.

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.

I suppose with any character that you play you always bring your personal experience to it. You always bring people that you know or that you've met and sort of - this is what I do, I mean, I don't know what anyone else does - but people that you know or that you've met that have affected you in certain ways, you bring into it.

I always tend to see, right after reading the script, the character and how I want to play it. I guess that's sort of most of the work, preparing for the role, but almost the creation of the character seems to go on as I read through the script.

You want to try and bring a character to life in an honest a way as you possibly can. It doesn't matter whether he's a doctor, an actor, a car salesman or a captain of a starship. If you can bring truth and honesty to that character, then your audience will believe you.

I think you have to draw from any character and bring it to yourself as much as possible.

That's what I love about acting, is playing different roles. I want to work for the character, and not make it work for me.