Aaron Lazar Quotes

My No. 1 piece of advice, especially for someone who's an actor-singer-dancer - a triple threat, they're called! - people say, 'What's the most important?' I always say acting. Without knowing why you're singing or what you're singing about, it's just noise. And without knowing why you're moving your body, it's just flailing of arms.

It's not enough to hit the notes. There is no point in the singers just standing there and sounding wonderful if they're not connecting with the characters they are portraying.

Good acting is confused with good dialogue delivery. Acting is about all about performance, and the way we interpret and understand the character that we bring alive onscreen.

I realised how important it is to have your body movement, your diction, tonality, dialogue delivery and to be in rhythm because everything is musical.

We have to put expressions in a song when we sing it.

Whenever I sing a song, I just want it to reach out to the audience.

Having grown up in musical theatre, I know what works and what doesn't.

All those little acting rules you get, one of the interesting ones is, 'Play the opposite. Don't play 'victim.'

You can tell when someone is reading the lines of a song or performing it.

I think one of the things that people take for granted when they watch a film is the actors have to exhibit an extraordinary amount of force to block out the stuff that isn't a part of their reality. And when the audience sees it, they're seeing everything the actor isn't seeing.

I know that one of my difficulties as an actor is to try to do too much, from all those years ago when my acting took place live on a stage. It was just my shiny face there, so you've gotta be super careful how much over-expressing you're doing with your eyes and nose and so on.

Playing King George, for me, was a lesson in stillness and timing.

When I am dubbing for my character, if I laugh at the figure on the screen, I know I have done well.

Learning method acting might mess me up.

The beauty of acting is you just get lost in it. You play the character, and you hope that it works.

Once you're in a musical, there is a huge opportunity for that, singing and dancing, 'Aha!' and 'Tada' at the end of the numbers; but it's a different kind of discipline you have to go through to maintain that kind of performance.

There's a wide spectrum of possibilities in how to deliver a song.

Most people when they see me cry for a shot, say, 'Wow, what a natural!' But I actually do cry and break down.

When I see an emotion being enacted by a great actor, I always feel I can never do that.

Singing is also like acting, since I memorize my lines, and I sing with emotions, too.

Everything feels so personal when you're an actor because you're so open and vulnerable, and you have to trust your director to guide you to where the storytelling needs to go.

Balanchine was just able to strike the balance between literal narrative and abstract dance.

I feel any actor can deliver a dialogue but real acting is how one reacts to the dialogue.

If I had to say the secret recipe for acting melodrama, I think it comes from myself in real life. I have a belief that when I do melo scenes, I try to make them less cheesy.

Playing '10,000 Days' in concert was very challenging but infinitely rewarding. It's much more sensitive and emotional than our other songs, and it requires pacing yourself and also being very vulnerable.