Viola Davis Quotes

There's always a concern as an actor that you'll be boring unless your character is swinging from a chandelier.

In sketch comedy, wear your character like a hat, not a suit of armor.

If you have to talk to more than three people about the same problem, you don't want help, you want attention.

Anything you put in a play -- any speech -- has got to do one of two things: either define character or push the action of the play along.

It depends on the scripts and the character and just everybody involved, the other actors and directors. It's just a gut feeling when you find something, you're like, 'Yes, I want to sink my teeth into that.'

I think the business of writing a great deal of it is the business of paying attention to your characters, to the world they live in, to the story you have to tell, but just a kind of deep attention and out of that if you pay attention properly the story will tell you what it needs.

I was on Stargate: Atlantis for four years, playing a similar character called Ronon, who was an alien that didn't say much and grunted. I've been there and done that. Whether people have seen it or not, you want to stretch. And then, while I waited, I got The Red Road, and I'd never gotten anything like that.

When you have an audience, and you have people who want to see your character and want to see you, it's really amazing.

I really am a character actor, in my heart of hearts, because I really do like developing characters and painting a past for them.

If you want to make a name for yourself, the oldest trick in the book is to attack what everybody else reveres.

Generally my instinct is to not do biographical movies. I want to build characters and not be locked into playing a part in history.

You have to write a song around this specific character or to enhance a specific scene. A lot of other craft goes on.

For me, what grabs my attention about the project is usually the character immediately and then the story, and then the people that are involved.

It's hard to play a continuing character like Loomis for nearly 11 years and simply wash your hands of him. It seems a pity.

As I get older, I'm more willing to take on more, I guess. I feel more comfortable kind of being different characters and kind of stretching it a little more. Like with The Visitation. At least for me, being an actor, I have to draw from human experiences, so it was kind of a stretch playing that role. Kind of supernatural... kind of like what I did in The Crow actually.

The poets needed to learn to pay greater attention to character and to narrative.

For me, as an actor, the most challenging thing is creating the character in the beginning because you have to write their backstory. The easy part about doing a sequel is that you've done the film, so you already know their backstory.

One particular night I was at the theater. I was not scouting for a project, but I was touched by this play by Évelyne de la Chenelière. I was touched by the character. I thought it was a rich character that could be rich enough for a movie.

In cinema we have all kinds of ways of communicating: cinematography, lighting, character performance. If you pay attention to silent era movie actors, they are big about postures and really exaggerated expressions so you can understand how they feel. We use all kinds of techniques from cinema to help communicate emotion.

When we approached the project, the very first thing we did was take each character and say, "Okay, where would this character be?" We didn't want them to be caricatures of themselves. We wanted them to live and breathe, and grow with the audience and with us.

As a director, you have a thousand things going on in your head, and of course, that's going to be difficult. That's going to mean that some things get overlooked. And so, for us as performers, being the selfish pricks that we are, we're sitting there being concerned about ourselves all the time and our character's through-line.

If you string together a set of speeches expressive of character, and well finished in point and diction and thought, you will not produce the essential tragic effect nearly so well as with a play which, however deficient in these respects, yet has a plot and artistically constructed incidents.

All actors are whores. They want only one thing: to seduce you.

History is basically really looking back and finding out what happened to an individual, a community, a family, a group in a certain event. And so that's why I go, "Wow. That's what acting really is. You find out the background, you get the joy of creating a fictional history of a fictional character and you get to tell a story." So I felt that acting is making history come alive and it became my mode of trying to figure out what this craft of acting is really all about.

When you find theater writing like in the theater on film but it's realistic, it doesn't matter who the character is, you want to do it.