American Actors 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.

Americans are very good at animating voices. I don't know why. They have a freedom with them that we British actors find more difficult to get to.

I think every American actor wants to be a movie star. But I never wanted to do stupid movies, I wanted to do films.

I had read the novel and I had heard David Lean was going to direct it - and it came as a surprise to me because American actors, if given the chance, can do style as well as anybody and speak as well as anybody.

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'm besotted by [Kirsten Dunst] now. I think she's just wonderful. I can't think for a second that however much she'd worked in America, she would never have had the chance to play [a role in Lars Von Trier's 'Melancholia' ] like that. You have to get outside of the States to do something like that.

Uta Hagen is our greatest living actor; she is, moreover, interested and mystified by the presence of talent and its workings; her third gift is a passion to communicate the mysteries of the craft to which she has given her life. There are almost no American actors uninfluenced by her.

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.

You and I are the two best actors in America.

Here in America, every single actor, since they were little boys, they sing and dance and perform like angels. We don't do that. We are actors who work in a theater in very classic performances or plays.

I think American actors are much more intimidated by Shakespeare.

I've always liked American actors particularly. Because that was my first impression. I was very enamoured of America when I was a kid because we were surrounded by American soldiers during the war, the accent was very strange to me, it was very exotic and very captivating.

I have done film, television and theatre - all at a pretty substantial level - I don't think it's possible for American actors to do that.

Where I think the American actor is slightly at a disadvantage is in vocal technique. I don't think that words are their friend in the same way that English actors are used to using words: understanding about consonance and how to shade a vowel to show emotional color.

I was very pleased you know, and I was afraid that I might stick out, but I didn't. My happiest thing about that picture is that I proved that American actors can speak as well and also fit in with an ensemble like that.

I love me some Martin Sheen.

I used to pre-rehearse everything and then bring my pre-rehearsed performance to the set. Now, I'm learning to let it happen in the moment. American actors are much better at that than British actors. If I knew how to trust myself, I would have been much more relaxed. Maybe I would have less gray hairs today.

English actors feel vaguely apologetic for being there at all. American actors know that the most important thing is to get one take out of fifty that is great, and they'll go to any length to get it. The English are used to working within consistently small, low-budget things and think, I mustn't waste their time.

British actors come at acting from a slightly different angle. Because a lot of the films are cast out there, they are so used to the angle from which the Americans, and certainly the young guys from L.A., are coming at it, that I think it's interesting for them to find these English actors who maybe approach acting from a different place.

I'm used to American actors who have a movie career thinking television acting is beneath them.

It was pretty daunting. Normally, I never go to a gym, but before we started shooting, I thought I'd better. I reckoned I was in really good shape, and then I looked around and I was half the size of everyone else. A lot of these American actors have this - in my view - misplaced view that they have to look like Action Man. The trouble is, they all run the risk of being interchangeable.

I love a certain kind of acting style that I would call non-American, which tends to be more detail-oriented and less externalized. There's a kind of naturalism that I often find in non-American actors. I also find that quality in the American actors I work with, but I like to bring in those influences creatively.

A lot of American actors I work with are in character all day long. You can't talk to them. It's Method and the whole thing.

Most young American actors feel like teenagers.

Coming from documentaries, my biggest challenge was to understand actors' psychologies. American actors take it all very seriously; British actors don't enter into all this methody way of doing things.