Jodie Foster Quotes

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.

Ultimately, the idea of acting is to understand the people you're playing, and then where they're coming from is not so mystifying. You've got to detox a bit after, though.

When I do film, I really take on roles and I take on characters.

The beautiful thing about acting is that you can just dive into the character, strip yourself of everything, and just get in there and perfect your craft.

In acting, you draw so much on your private life.

What happens with every role, you have to trick yourself, you have to creatively find ways to explore the mental state of your character.

When I'm acting, it's like I am the character - no one can talk to me. But I'm not so method I'd sell my house and live on the street to play a tramp.

That's what acting is about - for me, at least - tackling different personas and characters.

That's one of the things that's great about acting. You can play all the different aspects of a human being.

Any decent actor knows you can't judge the character you're playing.

In acting you have to not be yourself. It's like whatever character is put on, you have to just to turn into that person.

I used to think the actor's job was immersing himself completely in another personality.

What attracted me to acting, from the start, was playing different characters. I'm not a massive fan of just playing myself on screen.

There's lots of incredible roles out there that I'd love to tackle, but there's a select group of actors I find myself gravitating towards, like Philip Seymour Hoffman or Sean Penn or Daniel Day-Lewis - real transformational actors.

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.

All good actors are unpredictable, and a little crazy in a good way, because they feel more secure playing other people than themselves.

For actors, you've gotta sometimes fill in your backstory.

Sometimes I think of movie acting as advanced pretend.

I think all actors are supposed to be character actors.

The idea of transformation - playing something I'm not - is the bit I enjoy most about acting.

I try to steal from the best. Suck it all in. 'Taxi Driver' is really a bible for film actors, a master class. A lot of emotional power, a lot of emotional depth but it's contained and you just see the tip of the iceberg.

What's interesting about the process of acting is how often you don't know what you're doing.

I still think of myself as a stage actor. When I do film and television I try to implement what I was taught to do in theatre, to try to stretch into characters that are far from myself.

When I act, a part of me goes into the character I am playing.

With films, you completely immerse yourself in a character, get into who they are, live it and then release it.