Acting Principles Quotes

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.

You have to be truthful and believable in whatever you do and that is the founding principle of acting.

Because I used to go and watch him rehearsing for pantomime, and I have adopted some of those priciples, like try to be on time, learn your script, how he approach it, etc.

As an actor, the first thing you learn in drama school is you never judge.

I don't believe in method acting.

I am an actor first and foremost. Even without my involvement in politics, I was staying away from sub-standard work.

I don't take roles I can't respect. If I can't find a reason to be respectful of the character, I won't do it because I couldn't do it justice.

I mean one of the basic rules when you're acting is that you mustn't stand in judgement on a character, you mustn't say Hitler was a bad man because you can't act in that way.

Modern acting is method acting, most of it. And there are sort of different schools, so I guess I'm not really from one school or another. I had a number of different teachers but they were all kind of drawing from the same pool, which is - What do you want? What are you doing to get what you want? And, what is in the way? These are basic acting questions. Knowing the answers to those questions. So you're talking about objectives and actions and obstacles. That's a sort of shorthand that gives you a language.

If you judge the character, you cant play it.

When you're studying drama, when you're a young actor, there are simple rules about acting. "Why am I here? What prevents me from leaving? What am I trying to get? How do I hide something?" So when you're making a film like Abel's movie, you want to be thinking about those things all the time. And you wanna be armed with those things, and you hope the other actors you're working with have the same understanding of drama and scene and acting. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't.

You never play age, you play character.

Just working on a character and his mannerisms, but not looking the part, is not my thing. It is your duty as an actor to be honest to the character.

I've always had two principles throughout all my life in motion-pictures: never do before the camera what you would not do at home and never do at home what you would not do before the camera.

We all have an obligation as actors to be true to ourselves and our best instincts, but often there's a higher purpose, which is to serve the text and, in the grander sense, serve the series, even if that means to fall on your sword and take the hit.

For me, teaching helps to reaffirm the right principles and values of acting. It helps me focus on the good stuff that can be easy to lose sight of because the business is so result-oriented.