Helena Bonham Carter Quotes

It definitely helps to have the acting experience going into singing, because when you're singing, you have to portray the emotion you were feeling when you wrote the song. They're the same thing, in a way; it's expressing your emotions through words.

I'm interested in the acting and staging of specific emotions, and so I work with actors. It's a small proportion of what I do, but it's always what people seem to focus on.

The voice is always the starting place for me with a character.

I think when you're just counting on your voice, you actually need double the energy. I find myself acting out the scenes and being very physical while I'm recording because I think you can tell when someone is just sitting on a stool.

An emotional performance is usually more instinctive to an actor.

As I told you, from the time I was fifteen, I thought the theater was too much involved with actors trying to make the audience love them, being over emotional.

I love saying dialogue and creating a full character more than just being physical. But I always end up doing physical stuff in my roles.

That is one of the first things my family, my mother and my grandfather, had taught me about acting: 'Use your eyes!' Not being able to do that physical aspect of it, and having to put it all into your voice? That was a little bit of a challenge.

To me the voice has always been the way to start any character. Once I find that, I'm good to go.

I'm a physical actor in that I start with a physical sketch of the character. I find it easier to find inspiration from the outside in. If I find the character's tensions and the way he carries himself or looks, that's going to affect how I talk. So that's how I start to create that person.

I love accents; I would love to find more characters with a variety of vocal intonations. It creates a character. It's like you're singing a song. Some people find their character through walking or movement - for me, voice is one of the ways I find parts of the character.

The best way to show an emotion is not through a character's words, but their smallest expressions - to take what an actor would visually do and try putting that down on the page for the reader to 'see.'

I do sometimes wonder if people think, 'Oh we'll have her because she cries well.' The odd thing is I don't really know where it comes from. If the script is good, I find I can usually cry without too much trouble - in fact, the hard thing is trying to get me to stop. But I'm not really a crier in real life. I'm not a dramatic person, you see.

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.

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

As an actor, I love to play a good crying scene.

People think that unless you become the de-glam girl, who has horrible things happening to her, you're not really acting; all it takes to cry for the camera is some glycerine. Not doing anything is what's difficult; I know a lot of actors who will agree with me.

As a kid, I was obsessed with Broadway cast recordings, and I would totally mimic and memorize every little choice that these actors made.

When we create female characters, I think often there is a tendency to kind of make female characters emotionally bulletproof.

You know in acting you have those moments in a movie where a character yells or breaks down crying and you're like, wow, that's acting?

When an actor sings a song, he will be able to bring forth the emotion in it much better than a playback singer.

I use this method to bring emotion into my performance. I recite my lines in English first, and then switch back to the original lines when shooting begins.

The beauty of making theater is that you have to go and do it the next day. Making a show nightly is a really difficult skill. It's something every theater actor and every theater maker is challenged with.

Once I got so worried because I had to hit my costar with a glass bottle that I began crying.

There's no set rule, but when you look at the script, you start thinking about this person and how to create this human being on screen. You dig deeper into a script.