Acting Philosophy Quotes

I don't know how to play myself. I'm not interested enough in myself. That's just not how I was educated. That's not how I learned to become an actor. Acting is creating a character.

And at NYU, I went to the Atlantic Theater Company, and they have two main points. One of them is to always be active in something instead of just feeling it. And the other is figuring out your character.

I'm a task-oriented actor. A pretender. And I try to invent my process anew each time I make a new project. So I frown on any method.

I don't like to intellectualize about my acting. I don't sit around and study the pages of a script over and over again.

I don't categorize characters into one syllable. These are fully-rounded characters that I don't judge; I just play them.

I don't do method acting. If I play a farmer, I'm not gonna spend 3 weeks on a chicken farm. That's a bit too much for me.

I've found a lot of the thinking in America is that a lot of people become actors to become famous. At least from my experience, I have a dozen or so British friends who are actors, and if you look at their body of work, and they'll go do theatre, and they'll go do this and this. They work, and they're always honing and trying to be better.

I never want to play a character that's one-dimensional.

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.

I like to play characters, man. I almost don't even think of them as good guys or bad guys. I know that's a hard thing to realize, but I really just think of them as characters.

I don't play villains, I play very interesting people

I don't personally look to my own life experiences for answers about how to play a scene.

As an actor, I believe that acting is actually behaving truthfully under imaginary circumstances.

My approach to the work is the same, whether I had the lead or a supporting role. I consider myself a character actor in the true sense of the word. Unless I'm doing my autobiography, I'm playing a character.

My job playing Sam Malone was to let the audience in, to love my bar full of people. And that informed my life.

We did a lot of that in drama school: intellectualising and maybe justifying your position. 'I am a thinking actor and I have thought this through' - well, just do it. I much prefer the doing aspect.

I learned much more about acting from philosophy courses, psychology courses, history and anthropology than I ever learned in acting class.

Every actor will say there are no small roles. And that is true.

I try to make all of my roles likeable in some way.

Like Dilip Kumar, I've never run after money but only after good roles and that's why have always rebelled against those directors who wanted me to do buffoonery in the name of comedy.

I'm not what you'd call a Method actor.

I always view auditions as the first and last time I'll ever do a character, so that's how I like to see the joy in it. Assuming I don't ever book this, I get to play this character this one time and give it my all because I'll never play it again.

Some people think that acting's about being somebody else and I don't. I think this is how I would be given the same circumstances. And I do it for my own enjoyment.

I just want to bring as much natural as I can. I'm not saying that people who take acting lessons are false. They're much better than I am, but it doesn't work for me.

I don't do jokes. The characters are my jokes.