Actor's Control Quotes

Acting is a craft to me: I just think you get better the more you do it. And then the irony to that is your doing it is not in your control. If it was up to most actors, we'd work all the time, and we'd always get better. But it's not in our control, so we have to wait to be given parts to do.

I think I'm becoming more relaxed in front of a camera. I suppose I'll always feel slightly more at home on stage. It's more of an actor's medium. You are your own editor, nobody else is choosing what is being seen of you.

You're always going to have ups and downs - if you look at the careers of a whole bunch of people I respect, some of them have good movies, some of them have bad movies. I remember Andrew Garfield said that the only power we really have as actors - or one of the main powers we have as actors - is our choices. We can make interesting choices, but as soon as you've made that choice, so much else is in play: the director, the script can change, the other actors. All you can do is try to make interesting choices and, once you're in it, just do the best you can.

In the film industry you never really know if all the various ingredients will come together - sometimes they do, and sometimes they don't. As an actor, you don't have much control over those things. It's a director's medium in that sense. All you can really do is minimise the risks of being involved in something that might not work and look for something that also suits you.

In a theater, the part is mine and I can control it as I want to. In the movies, I don't have direct contact, and I am fighting technical machinery.

I don't know how you can tell a good actor in the movies. I really don't. I think you simply just do the part and hope to God that the director has a good cutter and a good editor, and it'll all get cut and put together so that you look good in it.

You never know when you're taking a job, ever... but you try to take good scripts. That's all you can do as an actor - take the best thing available. Even then, it's not [really] in your control. Certainly not in film and TV, because there are so many other elements. You just have to take control of your own performance.

The truth is that filmmaking is not really an actor's medium; it's really a director's medium, so all I can really control is the character that I'm playing. So I try to look for characters that are interesting and engaging and different than what I've done before and hopefully it becomes a good movie.

I also think the more experienced you get as an actor, you start to hear the conversations about why people get cast and not cast, sometimes it's so arbitrary. They decided the moment you walked in the door. And there's nothing you could have done to sway them, even if you'd the greatest performance of all time.

One of the things I've learned over the years is that you only do what you can do as an actor. You do the best job you can, but you have no control over so many elements that are going to determine the outcome of that film. I never pay attention to what happens after.

All the actor does is, he tries to get as many takes as he can out of the director that day. So he can walk away and say to himself, "Hey, it's in there. I'm not going to edit it. I'm not going to make those choices. If they want to blow it, it's fine. But I've done all I can." You're right. I'm always amazed when actors bash films as if those grips and that cinematographer didn't work hard enough.