Performance Truth Quotes

We actors can't say every line as if it has weight, but what we want to do is be true to the meaning of each line, whatever it is. Even the lines that are throwaway may come back later.

I think film and television actually is a lot harder. Acting onstage is physically more arduous, but to get to emotional truth within a scene, it's much tougher to do it on film.

The cool thing for me, as an actor, I like to be as true and honest as possible, and I'm into real fight training.

I take bits and pieces from everything. But I think the Method can be very isolating, and sometimes it's more about ego than playing the character truthfully.

I don't know what that Method is. Acting is life, to me, and should be.

For the actors, the talent is to serve the demands that I ask of them, to do it with naturality and truth, and to be honest when we were terrified.

I think our sense as actors of what we've just done - whether or not it be in an audition - is usually really not connected to any truth. I'm always asking for more takes and more goes. I think I just need to shut up and listen.

I've always felt that acting is acting, at the end of the day, so whether you're doing comedy or heavy drama or anything else in between, you always have to bring a semblance of honesty to it. It's all make believe.

You kind of wonder when you play a role, will people go 'Oh, is that part of you?'

If I'm playing a bad guy, and I'm playing him evilly - I'm making him evil; I'm being evil because I want the audience to understand that he's bad - or if I have a line that's funny, I do it in a comedic way, that, to me, is a lie. It's dead when I watch it.

I prefer theater, but I love to do films, and I prefer theater primarily because I've done more. I know less about movies. You can't lie in either medium. The wonderful thing is that the camera, just like an audience, is made out of skin - because celluloid is skin.

My job as an actor is to just tell the story as best I can from my character's point of view and let the audience decide.

When you see my performances, even people that you might have known, like Nicky Barnes in 'American Gangster,' you have to get over the fact that I look like Cuba Gooding, Jr. But once you find truth in the performance, if I'm doing my job right, you believe everything.

The stage is the opposite: you are talking loud so you can project to the back row and you know the whole play. In a movie, you are scene-to-scene; you only know the purpose of that scene. On the stage, that is artistic science. It is real, it is loving, it is truthfully you. It is two different formulas to make two different art pieces, but it is all about truth.

As an actor, the only thing we can do is play the truth at that moment. Because at any point in time if you play the future, or you play that you know something that the audience does not know, it kills the illusion of reality.

My job as a character actor is to make me fit the character, to serve the character. To present this human being who turns up in a piece of film or entertainment that's going, you know, exist as if it might exist after the film is finished and it existed before the film has started.

You can't be someone you're not on TV. You can in movies, but not on TV because you can't hide.

Acting is many things. Acting is playing lines, of course, but it's much more profound than that. Acting is truth-telling and trying to find the truth in a human situation, which will be sketched out by a screenwriter with all the skill that a screenwriter can do; but in the end, that's just the map of the journey.

In every character you play, as much as you hate to admit it as an actor, but there's an element of you that you bring to it. Either the character helps you discover that element of you or the other way around, where that element of you helps you discover the character.

A good content always allows me to reach the depth of the characters, and thus, the performance looks more relatable and truthful.

I don't believe that recordings should sound radically better than the artist, I think that's dishonest. For example, I'm not a great singer but if I spent enough time tweaking my vocals, I could sound like one. But I don't, what you hear is pretty much what I sing.

As an actor, I've always found that my job is not to judge the content in which I've agreed to perform in. What I try to do is just find the truth in every moment that they've written.

I love doing action scenes, there's that great thing when you sort of stop acting because if you're running, you're not acting like you're running, you are just actually running.

You'll very rarely find that you can enhance a performance to give it a real emotional centre and truth... after the fact.

Theatre is liberating because it only works if it's truthful - that's what it requires. That's not true of film: the camera does lie.