Ellen Pompeo Quotes

I never judge the characters I'm asked to play, and I don't need to feel that they are a part of me.

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.

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.

A lot of actors like saying, 'Don't judge a character; you might fall in love with him!' Not me.

I certainly don't like to play a bad guy. There are no bad people. It's only shades of grey. Also, I am not a great actor who can transform completely into a totally different character for a movie. I am not a trained actor.

Sometimes I'm playing somebody that I may have a problem with. Your job as an actor is not to go only play things that make you look good.

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

As actors, that has been challenging for us to pick up the nuances of the living legends we are playing.

None of the characters I've played are really like me. That would be boring. That wouldn't be acting.

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

I mean one of the basic rules when you're acting is that you mustn't stand in judgement on a character, you mustn't say Hitler was a bad man because you can't act in that way.

So you can't judge the character you're playing ever.

What I love to do requires portraying different characters, and you have to separate your life from the role.

I can't act, and so I have to live that particular character in my real life and then exhibit it on screen.

Well, with each character that I play in my life as an actor, I try to figure out how to find the challenge.

As an actor, you don't want to play a one-dimensional character.

Crazy is so hard to play, there's nothing you can really tell an actor.

You can't judge a character that you're playing, because then you're fighting against doing what the character's doing.

Whether you need to like a character, I don't think that's necessary in order to portray him.

Playing characters I don't relate to are a big challenge for me.

I think, for every actor, the most challenging part of playing a character, specially a real-life character, is to convince yourself that you are the character.

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

The character is everything that I felt really strongly against - she's superficial, materialistic, vain, amoral. She's all of these things, and I realised that I really hated her. How do you play someone that you hate? But I found it really interesting and it gave me a whole new insight into what my job, or my role as an actress, could be.

My job always is to play a person, not to judge her.

There's nothing worse - I don't like listening to actors talk about the process, especially when - I mean, for me I've played a lot of guys, dudes, boys in a sense and this was a challenge for me just to play that official character.