Immersive Performance Quotes

I'm a full-contact actor, meaning that I love to act in my toes and in my fingers, and I just try to keep it surprising.

With the type of actor I am, which includes really diving into a role and making it as real as possible, there's nothing better than working in a real environment on location. It forces you to feel what the character's feeling, and it allows you to live in the space of the character.

Make acting seem real and as if it weren't acting. Just make it real.

I always wanted to be a character actor. I love watching movies where you don't recognize someone because they're so lost in the part.

As soon as I leave the world [of the show], I want to turn around and come back. That's how real it is. As soon as I leave the theater I want to wake up and come back the next day and do it all over again. It's that much fun.

Some actors are brilliant character guys. They submerge.

The number one job of an actor is to be a character and never let the acting show.

If the actor believes in the moment, the audience believes in it, too.

To be unrecognizable in movies is the biggest compliment that anybody can give you.

The Actor should make you forget the existence of author and director, and even forget the actor.

I didn't play the Ghost Rider in the first movie. That was a stuntman. In this film, the Ghost Rider feels much more alive because I did put some thought into how he should walk and into how he should move. I was so into the character, in fact, that I would paint my face with white and black makeup to look like a skull. And I put on blacked-out contact lenses, so I almost looked like an Afro-New Orleanian voodoo icon by the name of Baron Samedi. Oh man, I would walk around the set without saying a word to anybody, and I could see the fear in my co-stars' and co-directors' eyes.

In 'Jonaki,' it isn't about the individual actor. The actor is as important as the wall, or the water flowing down the wall, or a shadow. That kind of acting is also fascinating to me, not to be invisible necessarily, but to be in perfect synchronicity with the environment.

A director once told me, "You need to act like you're on mute and speak as though the viewer is in the other room doing the dishes." You become a part of the house. We can make fun of telenovelas, but not to the point where we're mocking them.

I have never written a musical. I have never written a weird, interactive piece of theater. I wanted to do something that would be disturbing. It will be disturbing theater with songs. There will be no people on wires. That's probably the next one of those things on my bucket list of things that I need to write before I get hit by that car.

My whole thing is not just to play music for people, but to make them part of the evening.

I don't worry so much about the audience. I want them very much to be involved and enjoy the movie, but I try to just inhabit the character in a full way, where I can create a personal stake.

Acting with someone else, I can't tell how good they are because if I'm doing my job right, I'm just fully invested in everything that person's saying.

I like actors who just become that person and then react, and Adam [Driver] is completely reactive in that way. So every day working with him was really a pleasure. And he's in almost every scene in the film, so the poor guy had to work the - almost the entire 30 days of our film shoot. But, yeah, he was really a pleasure, and I really love what he - how he embodied this character.

Tilda Swinton is a great example of a person who completely disappears into a role.

With every single role, you're not going to get a role unless you invest your whole heart into it.

I like playing really super-intense, live-in-the-moment characters. It asks me to not phone it in. It's impossible to phone it in. Every American boy has spent his childhood pretending to get shot.

Whatever it takes to get you where you need to be, there's nothing wrong with the method acting or having to growl and bang your head in a corner and get into the moment and work yourself into a lather - if that's what it takes, so be it.

Daniel Day-Lewis is one of the greatest actors of our age; he's like Olivier. He's one of those people who can take you into a place where no one else can take you.

When it comes to acting, people talk about the suspension of disbelief that you ask of the audience. Before that starts, you have to, as an actor, suspend your own disbelief.

That one long scene in the Leftovers I have with David Gulpilil was seven pages long. When we finished it, Mimi Leder said, "I thought you were gonna do this in bits and pieces. You just did the whole thing." And I literally couldn't remember the scene. It wasn't that I was in a trance. I said, "Just keep shooting takes until you see what you want." In 48 years of acting, which is also how long I've been married, that had never happened to me.