Justin Timberlake Quotes

Same job, whether it's comedy or drama. Regardless of the weight of the role, I feel like the job is always kind of the same. Who is this person? What's this guy here, and how is he playing with this thing, and what's he trying to say? And what's the volley with all these other people around him?

When I act, I try to understand the character, why she's behaving like that.

For me, as an actor, the challenge is mostly before the film starts when you have to get into the psychology of the character.

In 'There Will Be Blood,' my character was someone who was an actor himself almost. He had a rehearsed quality about him. He was a performance artist in a way.

When you start out on a project as an actor, you know, you approach the character from the standpoint of maybe writing a list - even if it's a mental list that you make - of the adjectives that the character has or that character possesses.

What I mostly do is take the script, analyse the hell out of it, see what's in there, see what kind of person I'm dealing with, and then forget I'm playing a father and just play a person who exemplifies all those things.

The process changes slightly from role to role. Obviously, there are different things you're called on to do. You're not digging deep for Basher Tarr like I was for Paul Rusesabagina, but at the end of the day it's still all make-believe and you still are trying as realistically as you can to depict these characters.

I demanded two weeks of rehearsal because to me as an actor, that's the most important time.

There are always practical decisions to be made about any character you're playing.

Acting is kind of difficult to intellectualize - it's a far more visceral experience. It's really hard to be able to think about and then employ these kind of esoteric notions of this person's backstory and try to weave it in somehow. It's just kind of impossible.

I'm not a booky actor, I don't go away and do loads of reading up on a part, generally. I'm more interested in what the people we're portraying do physically, and looking at their sentence construction.

I do build my own backstory as an actor. It's important to know where your characters have come from in order to know where they're going - in order to exist in that state of being.

There are a lot of techniques for developing a character.

When you watch it, you're like, Wow. I look like that. But it doesn't feel like that at all. It was about communicating with Gale Harold and getting across what I wanted to say about the character.

Any sort of role requires a certain amount of research and embodiment of the character and psychological investigation.

Making a film of a work you've played for six weeks gives you intimate knowledge of the character. By the time you go in front of the camera you've worked out the behavior and life of a character.

I'm a Method actor. I spent years training for the drinking and carousing I had to do in this film.

That was the most important thing to me: making sure 'Gardner Elliot' was likeable and funny and interesting. I took my time before filming to chat with Peter, the director, to create this character.

If I prepare myself for a character, for a role, I always try to understand her.

As an actor, your first priority is the work - immersing yourself in the role, backstory, and bringing that to screen.

I rarely do any back story. I often get a thick bible of back story, but I can't use it. The back story is a tool of the writer. But I can only act what's in the scene.

Before the film begins shooting, in your head, you need to be the character. You have to convince yourself somehow.

I don't normally think of a specific actor. I concentrate on the character, and then when we get into pre-production, that's how names come up.

When a director narrates a character, I find it normal to ask questions about the character's background, mood swings, eccentricities, behaviour... I do this to make my performance relatable. Directors who don't know their characters well find it difficult to answer these questions and, hence, find me annoying.

I don't even know who my character is in 'Grey's.'