Mia Wasikowska Quotes

You have to have sympathy for and an empathy with a character in order to play them.

You use your emotions to try and find them in the character that you're playing.

You've got to empathize with every character you play.

If I wasn't an actor, I never would have known who Debbie Gallagher was. I never would know how her feelings are or how her emotions are, or her family.

It helps to be more interested in other people than you are in yourself. Inhabiting other characters is what I do.

I played a father a few times. You don't have to shoot heroin to play a heroin addict ... I'm not running for president but I could play a candidate. Most of the time, you don't really have to have those things in your life to understand what they're like.

I really become the characters when I'm writing them. I'll become one or two of them more than others, I'm consistent that way.

If you never fall in love with your character, you'll never be able to do that character justice. No matter who it is, no matter what the character does, you have to find the reason for it. Everyone's got a reason for what they do, even if it's a reason that they're not proud of.

It's always interesting to play characters who are vulnerable and how you display that vulnerability and what it's going to mean to people who watch it.

I'm sure there's pieces of me in all the characters I play.

I try to put myself into whatever character I play.

Empathy is at the heart of the actor's art.

I love acting and really taking on another person, another life.

Anytime you take on a character... you just have to find the parts of the character that you can understand.

That's what acting is. You're pretending to be someone else.

I care about all the characters I play, and I get quite defensive about them.

To play any character, you have to have a total understanding of why they do what they do.

I've always thought of acting as more of an exercise in empathy, which is not to be confused with sympathy. You're trying to get inside a certain emotional reality or motivational reality and try to figure out what that's about so you can represent it.

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

To act, no matter how the character is, you have to love and have compassion for the character you're playing.

When you take on a role, even if the character is somebody that you are dissimilar to, you have to identify with the role and look for an emotional connection even if there is not a biographical one.

You've got to love the villain if you have to play him. You've got to find something that you can live with in yourself if you're going to play the villain in a play on stage.

It's absolutely true that it's almost impossible to play a character without having any affection for him.

I love to act because I love trying on other people's skin.

In order to inhabit a character, you've got to embrace and empathise with them.