American Acting Quotes

The reason that most British actors are better than most American actors in the end is that they don't make any money. At the very end of their lives, they get into a space movie and they make a lot of money, but until that happens, basically, they don't have bank accounts. They live from day to day.

The American actor is much more used to being physically relaxed and using their bodies better, and English actors are a little bit unrelaxed, but they're better at vocal technique.

I think in the past, around the time that method acting became so prevalent, it used to be that American actors were thought to be the kind that would work more from the inside out, and that the English actors worked more from the outside in.

I think there's a quality of passion to the American actor. I'm certainly attracted to it, and I like to hope that underscoring it is a characteristic of my work. That quality is certainly also present in some British actors, but I tend to feel the mechanical and intellectual process is dominant in the British.

You can't generalise, of course, but there is a school of American acting where there is a kind of pride in the number of takes you can do.

The basics of acting are really better in America than in Europe. Just the basic "fake laugh" is impossible to get in France.

British acting is undoubtedly based in text, and American acting relies more on behavior. That's speaking very generally.

It sounds funny, but I felt that my responsibility as an American actor was to let the British know we can act as well as they can.

There's a particularly British way of going about things that I rather like, which is very different to the American way. It comes out of the amateur rep tradition of actors thinking: 'Well, I'm only 26, but I'll put on a beard and have a go at King Lear.'