Emotional Immersion Quotes

Acting is a really simple job - it's just hard to do. You just have to be that person with their background in that situation. That's all it is. My kids do it all the time when they're dressing up and playing games.

I was someone who was out of control and not to be worked with. It was partly because method acting was a new thing in Hollywood then and Marlon Brando had gotten through and Montgomery Clift had gotten through and James Dean but beyond that there wasn't really anybody.

How do I act so well? What I do is I pretend to be the person I'm portraying in the film or play.

I do figure every angle of a guy I'm acting - but not consciously 'til afterward.

The process of acting is no different [playing human or ape]. You're embodying the character. You're creating the psychology and the physicality. You're living the moment.

I'm a method actress in my songs, which is why it's hard to sing them.

The function of the actor is to make the audience imagine for the moment that real things are happening to real people.

As the actor, you just have to believe in what your character is doing in order to play them.

Most of the characters I'd played were so different from me, so far from me that I had to transform.

When I started in the theater, the joy for me was playing different parts, and I get set alight by different people and different worlds. The biggest joy for me is jumping around and going from that to this to that, never feeling that I'm any one thing - because I'm not, and we as people aren't.

I think the greatest thing about being an actor is that you can become other people. ... You have the opportunity to explore ... alternative ways of living for a brief time.

In a novel, I could submerge my ego in a character's and let his perceptions take over.

This is sort of inflection-free acting [playing Maigret], and I really wasn't sure if I could do it - you make your mind up on whether I've succeeded or not. But yes, I found it difficult when we were shooting; it was a couple of weeks before I settled into not worrying - to finding a way of delivering those lines - so my worries of many months before I think had been justified. I found it a difficult way of being.

Some people think that acting's about being somebody else and I don't. I think this is how I would be given the same circumstances. And I do it for my own enjoyment.

You can say something that can really help and actor and you can say something that can really get in the way of an actor's performance, kind of cut them off from their instincts and really get into their heads. And every actor's different. Every actor requires something different. Being an actor, for me, was the greatest training to be a writer and director.

Being an actor is easy, just picture someone in a room and you outside waiting for your cue to go in. Elliot Gould's been trying that for forty years.

Maybe that's partly why I'm an actor, I'm a fairly empathetic, emotional person, so I get very, very involved when it's really, really great when I'm watching - so it takes me a second to click back into reality again.

I'm not that complicated as an actor. I have a formula in which I work, yeah. But not like Sean Penn does. Sean is one of the few actors I know who can work like that, actually becoming the character he is playing, and get consistent results. I don't believe you can ever be someone else. You manifest different levels of your own personality to come up with a character.

Now I like to think that I'm in my character's head so much that I don't have to substitute. I'm in the moment; I'm living in the moment. And if it's genuine, it's real, and if it comes out it comes out.

I project myself so deeply into the characters in novels that I'm not thinking about my own life.

I sink down into my body as into a swamp, fenland, where only I know the footing…. I’m a cloud, congealed around a central object, the shape of a pear, which is hard and more real than I am and glows red within its translucent wrapping. Inside it is a space, huge as the sky at night and dark and curved like that, though black-red rather than black.

He closed his eyes as she put her hand on his shoulder, and in that instant, nothing else mattered. Not the song, not the place, not the other couples around him. Only this, only her. He gave himself over to the feel of her body as it pressed against him, and they moved slowly in small circles on the sawdust-strewn floor, lost in a world that felt as though it had been created for just the two of them.

Talking to actors is the same as talking to any other artists; it's getting into the moment for them, and making sure they can lose themselves in the performance!

I'm not the kind of actor that can go completely cold into an emotional scene. I have to transport myself emotionally by whatever means possible, and that basically means you carry the situation with you all week, all episode or all day beforehand.

The best thing about acting is when you're playing a scene and you actually become your character and lose yourself in that moment. That's when you know you've been succeeded at what you've worked very hard to accomplish in your profession. Those are the truly thrilling moments.