Rehearsal Techniques Quotes

I'm a terrible actor. I'm still learning. When I first started, I wish I knew then to trust myself more, really. I was in a terrible panic in the early part of my career.

Recently, my dad has been teaching me a lot - like how to read a script. It used to just be about hockey or baseball or sports of whatever. We don't have glitzy or glamour-y Hollywood-type talk, like, 'Isn't that person great?' It's more about the process of how it works.

Conducting, I tried it once off the cuff, and quickly realized there were subtle aspects that I was missing. There is a lot more to it that I was able to grasp simply by watching conductors.

I don't like to intellectualize about my acting. I don't sit around and study the pages of a script over and over again.

I didn't study interviews. I studied acting.

It's such a joy to work with different ensembles and create a collaboration. Rehearsing and building a performance is very interesting for me.

But then I got a job selling coffee at the York Theatre, and when I met theatre people, something clicked. I felt comfortable with them; I felt like myself. I decided to go to drama school based just on that feeling. I had never done any acting.

I'm a technician whose efforts go into hiding my limitations as an actor.

You can always keep learning with acting, because the school is life and yourself and your friends and your relationships. I'm fascinated by it! It's infinito!

A lot of actors are like, 'Why do I do this? My character wouldn't do this? This doesn't make sense.' And in a comedy, you kind of just need to walk into the door.

Just because I could model didn't automatically mean I could act.

Geddy once joked, 'You're the only guy I know who rehearses to rehearse!

Directors have been trying to get me to do comedy for a long time, ever since 'One Eight Seven.'

The whole process of acting is transformation. What is your power, quality and level of transformation, define you as an actor.

There were two auditions for 'The Social Network,' one with Aaron Sorkin and one with David Fincher. I was a nervous wreck. I was like, 'Okay, how do I hold the paper without my hands making it shake?'

'The Bank Job,' for me, was a great opportunity for me to do some good acting, you know?

Figure out a way to get back onstage because once you do it a few times you'll get over it. Unless it's like a clinical thing. I don't know about clinical like stage fright, that might be worse than what I'm talking about. But if it's normal stage fright get over it.

Well you know, Woody doesn't rehearse, as opposed to my own method of directing where I really work with actors around a round table for weeks, examining the values of the material, so his technique is very different.

There's no doubt that I owe a lot to my training of stage acting.

I learned acting while doing my shows. I never joined any course or anything. I just jumped into acting. I learn from experience.

I think when you're younger, as an actor you have much more of a notion that you are doing something to the audience. But with experience, I think you begin to worry less about what the audience's experience is and concentrate on working with the other actors, and that tends to let the audience do more work.

'Southland' was really where I learned so much about drama.

Classical stuff takes a lot of rehearsal time and preparation, but with stuff that involves improvisation, you can over-rehearse it and it gets stale. You don't want it to be too comfortable. In fact, a good sound check, a good rehearsal usually means a bad performance.

I'm not a big fan of rehearsing.

I don't get the jitters and I don't get nervous, because I build that comfort on set for myself. Sometimes if I'm gonna do something really crazy, it helps me to yell or look like an idiot on set, so that when I'm about to do a scene, I've already embarrassed myself. I find ways to work around getting the jitters.