Jamie Parker Quotes

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

An actor is someone who pretends to be somebody else. A movie star is somebody who pretends that somebody else is them.

In acting, you have to pull from real-life situations, from people, to help develop a character.

With any role, you're extending yourself and acting out things that never happened to you.

Yeah, I think the common denominator - and this is probably going to sound like Acting 101 - but the common denominator is belief in the character in the moment.

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

If you have a very good concept of your character, you can snap into it.

You don't become the character.

You try, as an actor, to wear a mask; you're serving a story.

Let me put it this way. There is more to acting than just acting like somebody. I like to act in such a way that other people get some notion of what it's like to be somebody.

Every time when I start preparing my character for a movie, I always try to make up and create my own background story for the role in order to fill it with life.

Trying to be a good actor has to be involved with placing yourself imaginatively in different people's circumstances.

Your job as an actor is to piece together whatever you've learned in your training, or whatever you have experienced in your life, to piece together a person.

Actors act... Their job is to become this character. And I have, in fact, seen Sam Heughan become Jamie and Caitriona Balfe become Claire right before my eyes. It was an astonishing transformation.

Once you're playing someone, you shouldn't be judging them in any way. That's what being an actor is - it's having empathy for people that are different from yourself. Once you've committed to that person, your responsibility is to tell that story.

For a time, I really thought acting was just impersonating. But impersonation is just big brush strokes, really. What makes acting different is empathy.

I never improvise. I create the character and transform into it.

When I do a character, I try to base it on someone I have met or an experience I've had.

That's why I enjoy acting: getting in the mind of someone else.

As an actor, our very palette is one of imagination. So it is a walk onto an empty space and then imagine the world beyond it is what we do.

It's your job as an actor to fill out the blanks. I love doing that. To fill in the bones.

Sometimes I think of movie acting as advanced pretend.

I find it easier to play someone who is so far from me because you create someone - you build this person based on the story and the script, with the director.

Ultimately, the idea of acting is to understand the people you're playing, and then where they're coming from is not so mystifying. You've got to detox a bit after, though.

I always enjoy impersonating my characters in the first-person singular.