Actor's Craft Quotes

We actors can't say every line as if it has weight, but what we want to do is be true to the meaning of each line, whatever it is. Even the lines that are throwaway may come back later.

As an actor, you use the things from yourself that you can apply to the character.

If people know too much about you, I think you become a little less interesting as an actor - your job is to fool people.

As an actor, I feel one should use his look to trick people.

Acting is very physical, even when it doesn't appear to be. It's about the arc of your body's language through a film.

I'm not a method actor per se, but if I'm playing a character that, at its core of its persona, has experiences I don't have, I try to search out and get firsthand experiences of similar sorts so I have something to fantasize about.

Studying cows, pigs and chickens can help an actor develop his character. There are a lot of things I learned from animals. One was that they couldn't hiss or boo me.

I think it's sort of a rite of passage for a British actor to try and get the American accent and have a good crack at doing that.

As an actor you bring some of your own experiences which can make things easier. You build off of it, but your imagination is always the best thing you have as far as creating things I think specifically for what that character is going through. But you're definitely drawing obviously upon things that you can connect to, and then you kind of mold the change that you're making into something that's right for the character.

It's funny, in a way the actor is a writer. It's not like the two things are so separate as to be like apples and oranges. The writer and the actor are one.

I do build my own backstory as an actor. It's important to know where your characters have come from in order to know where they're going - in order to exist in that state of being.

It's easier to see in someone else, another actor, how they kind of disappear and then this other persona appears. A great actor is a thing of mystery.

As actors we try to find different sides of ourselves.

You can't perish because of your own feelings; you have to embrace those things as an actor because it's part of your palette.

The weird thing is that, with actors, filmmakers and directors, it doesn't really matter if it's Robert Downey Jr., who's one of the biggest stars in the world, when you start to work, he's a hardworking actor. At the end of the day, it doesn't matter who's a big star and who's an unknown actor from wherever. It's all about the work you do.

No actor wants to play someone else's performance.

I've been acting a long time, and I can play a Cockney gangster or a womanizer in my sleep or standing on my head. But what I try to do is I try to find characters that are as far away from me as I possibly can and then make them real. A French Nazi is about as far away from me as I can possibly get without actually going to Mars or something.

When I'm in a movie, what I always do, instead of sitting in a trailer or watching a DVD, is I go on the set and watch the director work and the actors work, and sometimes I'll hang out with B camera and watch what they're up to and ask questions because there's so much to learn about the medium.

As an actor, our very palette is one of imagination. So it is a walk onto an empty space and then imagine the world beyond it is what we do.

The actor has to develop his body. The actor has to work on his voice. But the most important thing the actor has to work on is his mind.

In the beginning, when you're acting in amateur theater and off-Broadway, it was unheard of that anyone else would get your costume. And it was important to get a good costume. You put time into that.

The thing is, I love a great death scene - no good actor doesn't. Sorry, any actor, I should say.

Acting is a symbiotic process, it is an amalgamation of many many things put together and when there is a call for action, that's when you surrender and the moment of truth comes out, that's when you perform. That is the process for every good actor.

David Cronenberg knows what we actors do as artists.

It's my privilege to be able to play somebody not myself. I'm an actor who creates characters based in voice, movement, emotional quality, speech.