Actor Potential Quotes

I don't think one film is enough to showcase your talent or to show your abilities as an actor.

Doing 'Young Adult' was really reassuring to me in a lot of ways. It confirmed a lot of suspicions I had about great actors.

You never know where you're going to find a great actor.

There are a lot of good actors who work forever and never make one good thing.

One of the many things I love about working with Ryan Murphy is that you're always thin-sliced in this business. You walk into a room and people want you to be how you look or how you're perceived or whatever it is in that 10 minutes that hey meet you. I think Ryan [Murphy] has an intuition that looks a little bit deeper and sees things that other people might not see in you - sometimes you might not even see in yourself - but that he knows are there and that he might want to get to grow and stretch with as an actor.

A director like Ram Gopal Varma brings out a different dimension in your performance.

There are plenty of bad actors and there are plenty of bad directors. There are actors who will always be bad and there are good actors who you cry for because they're being badly directed or the material isn't good enough.

India is a great talent pool of actors. I see Freida Pinto making it big in Hollywood, and I am sure many others can also make it.

Good directors can bring certain things out of you, with their intensity or gentleness or sensitivity or understanding. They can make an actor feel he can do no wrong.

You can't get an actor to do something that is beyond his range, so you have to be aware of the range of the actor and, if necessary, alter the part to suit the actor.

One thing I've noticed is that I can tell when a young actor or a young actress is going to become a huge star. Everybody else will say, "Oh come on, Michelle Pfeiffer, are you kidding?" and I'm pretty much always right about that.

I think there's so many actors out there that we see and we know as one thing but are capable of so much more.

I think anybody can be a good actor.

Each actor, every single time you work with an actor, you have to come up with the language that's going to serve them. And that's what allows them to give the performance that you want to nurture inside of them and what you think they're capable of giving.

With music, you could stick someone with a musical instrument or even not a musical instrument, get them to showcase their talent, and within 30 seconds you could tell whether they were good or not, but with acting you have to give them the right part.

I try to get the best performance an actor can give.

What I love about him [Robert Rodriguez] is that he understands that actors are transformational. It's a natural instinct to ask people to do what you've seen them do before. Until you see someone do something new, you don't know what they can.

Everyone brings their own particular skill set to the job, and acting training can work for a lot of actors, and it can't. I've seen a lot of really good actors go into acting schools and then come out a little bit corrupted.

I've had a couple opportunities where I've been on the other side of the audition process as a director, so it's really reassuring to me that it's just about who is right for that role and less about if you ace the audition. It's just about getting to know people, not about who's a better actor a lot of the time.

I never will believe there is such a thing as a great actor.

I think someone like Khandi Alexander, who's now on 'Treme,' is one of the most extraordinary actresses I've seen in years. But she's dependent on someone brilliant like David Simon to realize that and to give her a forum. Tyler Perry's not interested in that kind of nuance because it doesn't sell.

To me, casting is all about finding a character within the actor off the screen as much as on the screen.

I'm not saying every musical theater actor can do film or television, but a lot of them can. A lot of them are brilliant actors who absolutely don't need to sing to prove their ability and don't get the opportunity.

As a director, you see something in someone; you know it's there, you just got to go get it. You do that with any actor. That's your job.

There are so many talented actors in Chicago, I have to go see shows when I'm there. A lot of these actors, who I've seen when I'm in Chicago in theaters, are technically amazing and never have an opportunity to showcase it on a bigger medium.