Acting Subtlety Quotes

Part of my aspiration as a film actor is to bring subtlety to everything I do - honesty but subtlety.

I always find it easier to portray myself as being unlikeable and idiotic; to actually play a character that is likeable and engages the audience is far more difficult. It's a more subtle kind of challenge.

It's well done if you can do a part and not have the acting show.

If you are playing King Lear you are the centre of attention anyway. You don't need to draw attention to yourself. It's all laid out for you.

I felt that there could be some anger. There could be some frustration that he has the tendency to take over the room, but I wanted all of those things to show in the grays of her hair and the fact that her hips are much wider than they probably were when she met him. I wanted it to show in the fact that her hair is not done up all the time. I wanted it to be a part of that every day that wasn't in your face. Because then for me, that's overacting. To me, that's not "being." I wanted Rose [in "Fences"] to be many things.

I don't have any complex plans for playing a character. I think all I try to do is not make too many bad guy faces and not ever try to seem too good. I just try to put it in the middle somewhere.

I don't like showing the technique. I don't like people who say, "Here, I'm going to act, but first I have to bounce off this wall." If you have to bounce off the wall, do it by yourself. Don't feature the technique. My old drama coach used to say, "Don't just do something, stand there." Gary Cooper wasn't afraid to do nothing.

What's so fascinating about people is what they don't show. People are masters at it; usually actors show too much.

In terms of scripted shows, I love 'Mad Men.' Cinematically, it's one of the most beautiful shows ever made. I love the subtlety of the acting and the storytelling, and I love that they don't think the audience is dumb. They make a great show, and you figure it out, and it leaves you with so many questions - it's just great.

Even the finest actors will have great difficulty showing somebody's loneliness. To put an actor on a chair and ask him to do nothing and yet tell the viewer everything about the character, it's a difficult task.

Well, I think one of the main things that you have to think about when acting in the movies is to try not to make the acting show.

Quiet people, people who aren't given to emotional outbursts, people who are economic with words - they're also fun to play, but you find yourself needing a laser precision in those roles. Otherwise you just sort of stand around, looking slightly brain-dead. You worry about being uninteresting.

There were a couple times with close-ups where I tended to overact. I would use more of my face than I needed to. I learned how to be more subtle.

I learnt to keep my acting subtle.

You can't steal every scene. There are scenes in which you need to sit back and do a lot less, verbally, physically.

I've always loved subtle acting, and that's what I got to do.

It's a fine line. If you withhold too much, you come across as wooden - as I've often been described in some movies. Fair enough. I believe that the best performances are the ones that an audience has to search for.

Mads has a terrifying subtlety and as the episodes go on, you start seeing the way a person can command other people by doing practically nothing and terrifying the sh*t out of you. He is the most astonishingly subtle performer with the most incredibly keen sense of what his face can do and how his words can form. He has a mission. Nothing is by chance. I truly believe as long as we have success in seasons that Mads will become the defining face of Hannibal Lecter.

It's hard to talk about acting because I don't think it's quite as explicit as a lot of people might think. And that's probably the best thing about it.

I'm not interested in playing the villain as a loud caricature, one-dimensional character. I am trying to humanise evil. If you see my character in 'Aurangzeb,' I am not trying to act evil.

Things in the ring are definitely bigger, so that you can see them. But the movie world is completely different, and you have to hone things down because when that camera is so tight on you and so intimate and right up in your face, it's going to catch every little thing that you give it, and it's very easy to overdo it.

Scarlett Johansson has a smile she tries to suppress in every movie she makes. She's been trying to keep a straight face since she appeared with Bill Murray 11 years ago in her breakthrough, 'Lost in Translation.'

If you don't see me act, my work is done. The actor must never take the character beyond the scope of the movie.

We can bring it all down to the subtleties of the shifting of an eye because we know the camera will catch it. That has been a great thing to learn, and it makes it interesting for a guy who has been in it as long as I have.

If the character is getting mad, getting upset or getting turned on, you're getting to see that in the facial tones and the skin tones. That's what I enjoy about acting. It can be very subtle, like that.