Acting Truth Quotes

To be an actor, a true actor, you have to be brokenhearted.

To me, acting is simple. People put other things in front of it, but it's staying in truth.

When I saw Paul Scofield do 'Love's Labor's Lost at Stratford,' that's when I saw the potential of the level of truth that could go on up there on a stage. I said, 'This is what I want to do.'

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

It's not the actor's job to be interesting; that's the script's job. It's our job to be truthful and brave.

Never lose yourself on the stage. Always act in your own person, as an artist. The moment you lose yourself on the stage marks the departure from truly living your part and the beginning of exaggerated false acting. Therefore, no matter how much you act, how many parts you take, you should never allow yourself any exception to the rule of using your own feelings. To break that rule is the equivalent of killing the person you are portraying, because you deprive him of a palpitating, living, human soul, which is the real source of life for a part.

I think the responsibility that any actor has is to bring some truth to the work.

Wisdom consists in speaking and acting the truth.

There's a large chunk of me in all the parts. As an actor, I got involved largely because I want to let things out. The best acting is that that is most real and the only way to do that, is to genuinely feel it.

Actors are pretending for you, but they're not lying. They are not putting on a guise instead of themselves. They are finding things inside that they have experienced.

I've said before that the common perception that all good actors should be good liars is exactly the opposite; only bad actors lie when they act.

[J.F.Kennedy] is an iconic figure. And to make it even worse, he's a hero of mine. And every actor will tell you that you can't play heroes. And you can't play villains. You can only play human beings.

When I go into making a movie, personally, I don't try to bring other pieces of movies with me. I think that finding a character, relating to her and making her as real as possible means forgetting all of that stuff and just trying to find the truth, in that particular character's words.

The trick [in comedy] is always to figure out how real you're playing it and how real it's supposed to feel. That's a hard thing to figure out.

For the actors, the talent is to serve the demands that I ask of them, to do it with naturality and truth, and to be honest when we were terrified.

Nobody is more truthful when he's acting than De Niro.

Somebody once said that you can never act and be another person; you're only acting facets of yourself. I think there's a lot of truth in that.

You know, young actors say all the time, 'Should I use my own life experience?' And my response is, 'What choice do you have?'

I don't believe actors who say they don't bleed into their characters. It's absolutely impossible not to.

I think every character I play definitely has parts of me. I can't ever play someone that's completely different to me.

My performance, I believe, is about my duty to the script, and my duty to the story that we're trying to tell, and I try to do that in a way that is true, in a way that's going to hold up the script, and that's going to be fun for the viewers to watch.

Contrary to the popular misconception, the actor is not necessarily a specialist in imitating or portraying what he knows about other people. On the contrary, the actor may simply be a person who's more willing than others to reveal some truths about himself.

It is the writer’s job to make the play interesting. It is the actor’s job to make the performance truthful.

Every role you play is literally - and I've said this before - every single role that you play, the only way you can connect to that character is because that was a piece of you that was scattered around that yard, almost like we got caught up in some whirlwind.

When you're with another actor and doing something very intense, often you pull them over to your side, or they pull you over to theirs. But if you stay in your own truth, you can play that perfect tennis match. I always want to bring my power, but not in a way that eliminates the whole game!