Elizabeth Banks Quotes

I'm almost tempted, when I'm playing a real person, not to meet them. Afterwards, maybe. But, the job is the same. You still have to show up on screen and be alive and real and all that stuff.

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.

It's not a pleasure torturing actors, although some of them enjoy it.

I just think the less you know about an actor, the more serious you'll take them as an actor because they will disappear a little bit.

I don't believe actors who say they don't bleed into their characters. It's absolutely impossible not to.

Actors who say they can dive inside a character are either schizophrenic or lying.

I don't try to make actors play crazy characters. I like where there's a certain element of who they are and truth to their performances.

I wasn’t getting obliterated, but I was getting a kick. I was very method on that. That’s why I’d have gone along with it [if Tom had hit her]. But Tom was like: ‘Oh my God – I hope you don’t murder me!’

I like playing really super-intense, live-in-the-moment characters. It asks me to not phone it in. It's impossible to phone it in. Every American boy has spent his childhood pretending to get shot.

When you're acting, everything is there around you, you just have to believe that it's real. When you're standing there with a slightly grey wig on and you have a baby in your arms screaming in your ear, you can go: "Well, I guess this is what it's like!"

I've dealt with a few method actors, and I don't know if should say this, but I think it's a bunch of nonsense. I think it's film acting and you just have to be on when the camera is rolling.

I think what I find challenging is just trying to bring a truthfulness and a realism to a character.

The actor becomes an emotional athlete.

I love people like Renée Zellweger who aren't afraid to look unattractive and really put themselves into a character role and to really be an actress instead of just thinking "Am I on-screen pouting and looking beautiful?" because that's not really what it's about.

The essence of acting is the conveyance of truth through the medium of the actor's mind and person. The science of acting deals with the perfecting of that medium.

Movie acting is harder than doing a play. You have to be entertaining but completely natural, like Jimmy Stewart and Cary Grant. They weren't doing anything. Do you have any idea how hard that is? That's how good they were. It's crazy hard to be convincing and real. It's the most subtle, hardest thing there is.

There's a quote from Hamlet that is my guide... He tells the players not to exaggerate but to hold a mirror up to nature. Don't overdo it, don't underdo it. Do it just on the line.

The only people who become disillusioned are people who have illusions.

I always tend to like the characters that I play. I'm convinced that I am this person and I'm OK with whatever they do.

I think if you play characters, it's very important not to ever tag them with any sort of disorder, or diagnose them, or whatever. You have to normalize the behavior to get inside the character.

I'm an unashamed realist, and actually, I try to make whatever the script is the reality of that situation, even though it's fictional.

I believe in storytelling, not story-selling. I want people to believe the characters are real. So I'm a realist.

On the very last day of shooting [of The Last King of Scotlang], I remember wanting to get the [Idi Amin] character out of me right away, as much as I could. You literally take a bath to wash him off you. Luckily, I went into another part not so long afterwards, so I was kind of able to push it away a little bit. But speech patterns, and little sounds, particularly colloquial things, like the way you ask questions or might respond, were sticking with me, probably because I'd worked so hard to make it a part of my everyday way of expressing myself.

When you're acting you always want to come across as if you're not acting. For me, my take is always to have it feel like you're watching someone on film and that comes with a lot of preparation time.

Successful actors and actresses have to get themselves into their roles before acting. Therefore, you need to really care about what you are saying.