actor's persona Quotes

People work so hard, and I want to keep that energy up, and you can spread that if you're the actor. But I'm also not able to turn it on and off like a faucet. A lot of what I'm called upon to play is violent or angry. When I'm messing around with the crew and making jokes, I remember, 'Oh, this is the guy I normally am.'

I was the classic killer. I always played an angry man. I think it was because I used to really be like that - I was hostile. And because I had a good sense of theatrical truth, I used my anger and rebelliousness and just went with it. Anger was just a part of me.

Abused as we abuse it at present, dramatic art is in no sense cathartic; it is merely a form of emotional masturbation. It is the rarest thing to find a player who has not had his character affected for the worse by the practice of his profession. Nobody can make a habit of self-exhibition, nobody can exploit his personality for the sake of exercising a kind of hypnotic power over others, and remain untouched by the process.

I believe I am a character actor who likes to hide behind my characters.

When I'm not acting, I don't feel like an actor.

Movies are a powerful medium. People think you are your character. I've had plenty of people who think I'm Drago. They don't know about the chemical engineering part of my personality. They don't know about the geek part of my personality.

I don't want people thinking they know me instead of the character. Steve McQueen has loads of stories about him - who knows what's true? But it's great for people to fictionalize rather than know the truth.

I am a little in awe of Jeff Bridges. He's an actor I have admired for many years, and so I didn't know who I was going to get, in the sense that I didn't know what he was going to be like. And so I was pleasantly surprised that he is this kind of laid-back guy.

If I wasn't an actor, I'd be a moody folk singer, sitting on stools and being very depressing.

Very often there's this misapprehension about actors being people that need to display themselves, to reveal themselves in public.

I am definitely the same person I was when I finished 'The Impossible.' That's one of the things I really strive to keep.

People would be shocked to know... that despite the nature of my TV character, I am actually a nice guy.

Actors are hard to photograph because they never want to reveal who they are. You don't know if you're getting a character from a Chekhov play or a Polanski film. It depends what mood they're in.

I dated a guy who played bad guys in movies all the time, and I think he was just a bad guy.

Though I have done films like 'Siruthai' with larger-than-life characters, I have more of a guy-next-door image.

Now what's important is that they have an attitude. Everybody has a look, but not everybody has cultivated what their stage persona is. And so when you're dealing with actors, it just makes it more difficult, because you have to help them come up with one. You know, Johnny Depp has no Johnny Depp character when he's onstage. You haven't seen An Evening With Johnny Depp at Carnegie Hall.

I used to need the character but as I've gotten older I need it less and less - I prefer to play some version of myself. To approach any acting job as me just being me.

An actor's off-screen persona should never overshadow his on-screen characters.

I know I always look like the evil one bossing the band around in 'Scrubs' - well, I'm the same in real life too.

Every part I play is just a variant of my own personality. No real character actor, of course, just me.

Tommy Lee Jones is hilarious. I would say, if you look at the body of his work, the character he is most like is the one in 'The Fugitive.' That's how he talks and jokes. That is the type of energy he has.

I much prefer the company of the crew, the sort of 'blue-collar working person.' I much more have that sensibility than what the public perceives as what a typical actor would have.

I'd like to think I'm a little more easygoing than the character on 'Deadwood,' without question.

I'm not saying that Sam J. Jones was Flash Gordon - there's no such thing. No actor can be the person, that's a bunch of crap. People pay to see an actor be himself, whether he plays Hamlet or whatever.

Once you look past the hype, actors are nothing more than fugitives from reality who specialize in contradiction: we are both children and hardened adults—wide-eyed pupils and jaded working stiffs.