Role-Taking Quotes

The main experiential determinants of moral development seem to be amount and variety of social experience, the opportunity to take a number of roles and to encounter other perspectives.

I feel like every role you take, there's a part of you that obviously feels like you can do it. I don't know if perfect is the right word because I don't believe in perfection. I don't think it exists.

Anytime you take on a character... you just have to find the parts of the character that you can understand.

I think every role you take on, you should take on the responsibility of doing the best representation of that person or that character or that role. When it is a human being that has actually existed, and it is a person that people know of, yeah, you feel an even more amount of pressure to do a good job.

Every role affords me something different in the way of understanding, and that's really why you take these roles, not to show that thing that people talk about of showing what you can do - that has nothing to do with anything.

It depends on whom I'm with. Sometimes I start out in my own voice, and no matter who I'm with, I take on their thing.

What gives it its human character is that the individual through language addresses himself in the role of the others in the group and thus becomes aware of them in his own conduct.

Is it easy for me to write from a female point of view? Yeah, I am a female. I'm a very sensitive type of guy. I try to put my female hat on and think how a female would think. If I'm watching 'The Notebook,' I'm definitely gonna cry. I cried during 'E.T.' too.

The first meaning of 'cognitive' for us is that observations of others are made phenomenologically: i.e., by attempting to take the role of the other, to see things from his or her conscious viewpoint.

When I go to a great movie, I can live somebody else's life a little bit for a while. I can walk in somebody else's shoes. I can see what it feels like to be a member of a different gender, a different race, a different economic class, to live in a different time, to have a different belief.

I never feel like I'm looking to get away from my own self. Not as much as I'm trying to get inside the mind of somebody else.

Every actor is riddled with insecurity, of course. But weirdly, I don't really find that I'd be daunted with taking on roles or anything.

Approaching a part or thinking about taking a part, I never think, 'Is that person like me?'

All great writers are schizophrenics, you know what I'm saying? 'Cause they switch up. They become the person when they write.

If your sense of self is destabilised, to imagine being another becomes pretty easy.

For most of your career, what you're trying to do is to step into other people's shoes.

It's good to have to put yourself in someone else's skin. It's all-consuming.

As actors, you play people who are not yourselves!

At the beginning of every role I take, I have to start from basics and build it up. It's like a new construction.

Taking on different characters and seeing things through the eyes of different people is interesting to me. When I look at what people are going through in life, I try to understand their story.

As an actor, you have to be able to take all sides as well. You have to at least be able to understand things. No bad guy looks in the mirror every morning and says, boy, I'm gonna be a real bad guy this morning. He goes after his own what he's after, just like us good guys. You kind of have to take a stand and, a lot of times, you have to take the writer's stand or the stand of the character this writer has created.

As actors you're always going to take certain roles that are in your comfort zone and take ones that aren't.

Maybe from now on puppets can do the parts

When you start and you're taking the character seriously, it's going to lead down a variety of paths.

I wouldn't be where I am without these Funny or Die videos in general. When I was first starting out, I would take roles just to get the experience, but not exactly because I believed in the projects I was doing.