Performance Depth Quotes

The wonderful thing about acting is you move along with your decade. The older you get, the more interesting the parts you get to play and you bring more of your personal experience to the part.

Actors need to know why they're saying what they're saying, more than just learning their lines.

'Next to Normal' has challenged me as an actor because of how complex Diana is. And that's got me hungry for another character like that in a non-singing role because it would be interesting to express that same intensity in a different way.

As an actor, you want to be able to move your character forward into new ground, but also it's really interesting to go backwards and unpeel those layers and the interesting elements of what your character is and what informs the decisions that you make so that you can have as much meat to work with.

I never really absorbed myself in a role like some actors do.

If I can play a scene in a master shot, I always prefer it. And the actors always prefer it. It's fun to look at on the screen, the actors get a chance to sink their teeth into something substantial, and it's economically helpful.

As an actor, you don't want to play a one-dimensional character.

You get to know a character that you play on-stage in a pretty profound way over a length of time. I don't want to sound highfalutin and say you become the character, you just start bringing more and more of yourself to the part until the character and actor, it's hard to tell them apart. It's some weird amalgam. In film, because of the period of time, I don't know that you ever get that deep into it.

As a young performer, I didn't know that you can have a great time playing someone in terrible crisis. The more you know it's not real, the deeper you can go into it. And the easier it is to let it go when it's done.

I can't just say the words, do a lot of one-liners. I love each person I play; I have to be that person. I have to do him true.

Wrestling went from being sometimes comical to very serious, and there was a lot of depth regarding the vastness in which people performed.

In TV, sometimes you get lost in the fog of the scene, and when you're working with such good actors, they can bring you into the scene.

My primary instinct as an actor is not the big transformation. It's thrilling if a performer can do that well, but that's not me. Often with actors, it's a case of witnessing a big party piece but wondering afterwards, where's the substance?

If you know why someone is doing what they're doing, why they're behaving the way they are, then that's your job to reveal that, and often that's situational. The storytelling does that, and then some of it's your job as an actor to make that subtext come to life.

Whatever character you're playing you have to complete the entire interior infrastructure, whatever it is - but what gets divulged or what people completely understand depends on the script and what you decide to show. But you have to know it.

Garry Shandling in particular - really had the concept. He really knew it, and it was done so lovingly. He would go beyond the joke, and sort of go into the character. His "funny" was very different, and I really appreciated it.

Usually, I don't feel comfortable with a character until I've played him before an audience for several performances. It is not until after three months of performing that I learn to discover what I call 'all the nooks and crannies' of the person.

I think it's my job to like any character I play - to understand and appreciate a character, to look at the world as much as possible from their point of view. I don't look at it just technically: learn the lines, figure out what gestures I want to bring and play, and that's it. I like to learn as much as I can about the person, and see what happens.

I'm much more character based. I try to just be really committed to what I'm doing.

All my roles are character roles. On the other hand, there are those people who have an inner...I think we all do the same thing. You can't get by on aura alone. That I know. Everyone has to dig in. Everyone has to do the same set of, "What is this about? What is this character doing?" Everybody from Spencer Tracy to Brad Pitt to Jeffrey Tambor.

I've always been a character actor, although I'm not quite sure what that means. All my scripts are absolutely covered in notes, so any time I say anything - even 'pass the salt' - I have six subtexts, comments on what I really mean when I'm saying that. Maybe that's what gives the impression that I'm saying one thing and thinking something else.

In films you do a scene, you play around with it and unless you're doing a lot of reshooting, which no one has the luxury to do, you deal with the problem for a day and then you move on. On some level, it never allows you to go very deep into what performing is about.

Real acting is about giving people an insight into a person, letting the audience in.

You have actors who begin at a certain young age and there's very little change in their technique and the depth of their performances; they're the same 30 years later.

As an actor, if you're just sitting and staring and you don't know who you are in your own mind, it's vacant. And sometimes the camera is an X-ray machine, it can pick it up.