Performance Nuance Quotes

You've noticed that same joke told by two different people, once works, and the other time doesn't, simply because how the person edits it. The silences, the pauses, what they neglect, what they emphasize - all of this matters.

I always find it easier to portray myself as being unlikeable and idiotic; to actually play a character that is likeable and engages the audience is far more difficult. It's a more subtle kind of challenge.

You can't think that you're playing a villain, or you'll end up with a cartoon. You have to think about him as a person and a hero.

I think actors always find the dialogue doesn't quite fit, so you always have to play with it.

As soon as the actor steps into the role, you probably can cut 50% of the lines because there's a person there now. And what a person does with their eyes, with their mouth, with their hands, the way they walk into a room, you can probably cut half the scene.

I felt that there could be some anger. There could be some frustration that he has the tendency to take over the room, but I wanted all of those things to show in the grays of her hair and the fact that her hips are much wider than they probably were when she met him. I wanted it to show in the fact that her hair is not done up all the time. I wanted it to be a part of that every day that wasn't in your face. Because then for me, that's overacting. To me, that's not "being." I wanted Rose [in "Fences"] to be many things.

Much of the day I have busied myself making notes on the small parts in Shakespeare, often nameless, which are rewarding to the actor if only he'll not dismiss them as beneath his dignity. If I can work it up into a talk I might call it, 'Only a cough and a spit ' -the phrase so often used by actors to explain away a lack of opportunity.

I always like to try to bring whatever I can to what is on the page, so I like to find as much dimension as I can, in each role.

If actors are trying to convey, in a smart way, the context of the scene, that becomes too self-conscious.

Fine-tuning a play like 'Uncle Vanya,' which is already well-known to the people playing it, is not so much a verbal exercise as it is a visceral one.

Whenever you're playing somebody who is, by all accounts, rotten, don't focus on the rotten stuff. That stuff will take care of itself. It's already in the script; the audience is already experiencing it without you having to add an extra feel of evil. Just play them like regular people.

A great actor is independent of the poet, because the supreme essence of feeling does not reside in prose or in verse, but in the accent with which it is delivered.

I'm usually told to do a take where I do less with my face.

Lots of times it really doesn't matter what notes you play, but what notes come before and after a run.

Just like using an instrument, a song calls for different things.

With a role like Hedda Gabler, which is incredibly complicated, you often feel that you haven't even scratched the surface the first time around, so you relish the opportunity to do it again, particularly with an ensemble of actors and the company we assembled. But when you do that in films you somehow have to make some attempt to uncross people's arms and you have to justify why you're doing it.

I learned so many roles so quickly as a young singer, I thought it was time to come back to them and make them better - deeper, more nuanced.

When you're performing, you're playing to the back row. With acting, you have to be more nuanced.

It's so different going in the studio and singing your own music and you don't really think about making sure that the message of the song or the idea behind the song comes across to people. Because it's in your head, it's in your heart, whatever, but it's... different when you're playing a character and you're singing as the character. There's just a lot more involved in that, I guess.

I certainly thought of who [Tony from "I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore"] was. He was so different from anyone I've played. And it was so important for me and Macon [Blair] - this was on the page too - to not make a caricature. There's a version of Tony that I think could be heightened.

I don't play roles, I play characters. There is a vast difference between the two.

Sometimes when you belt, it kinda makes the song more dramatic than it really needs to be. There are certain songs that you hear, and you're like, 'Wow, he's singing about his girlfriend, but he sounds kinda mad the way he's yelling, 'You're so pretty!''

You don't have to kill somebody to play a murderer. You have to read the script and interpret the character.

I played the ingenue, of course, when I was young - but even with those, I tried to make interesting choices and mess them up a little bit - make them layered and complicated and not all stereotypes.

Sometimes you can do certain things on stage, or even in a TV series, and people see the look on your face and they know what you mean, so you can get away with certain things. But if you can't create that look on an animated character, which is essentially a puppet, the line will hit the audience in a very bad way.