theatrical embodiment Quotes

The process of acting is no different [playing human or ape]. You're embodying the character. You're creating the psychology and the physicality. You're living the moment.

I just know that when I go onstage, I give everything I have, not only my feet, not only my legs, not only my body. I try to tell a story. Sometimes I am able to cry because I feel like it. Sometimes I am able to love because I feel like it.

Theatre is poetry that rises from the book and becomes human enough to talk and shout, weep and despair

When I'm on stage, I'm not me playing me. I'm somebody else doing me. I could never go on stage and be like, "Hey, I'm Mike Tyson. My mother and father was in the sex industry." That's the politically correct way to say it, but I would really say, "My mother and father were pimps and whores. This is my life." I could never do that as Mike Tyson. Because I'd feel sorry for myself. But if I could be objective about it and be somebody else, portraying Mike Tyson, saying this story, then it's easy sailing.

As far as I'm concerned all theatre is physical. As Aristotle says, you know, theatre is an act and an action, and he didn't mean just the writing of it, he meant that at the centre of any piece there is an action, a physical action.

Actors are always going to have a little bit of themselves in everything.

Theatre is a concentrate of life as normal. Theatre is a purified version of real life, an extraction, an essence of human behaviour that is stranger and more tragic and more perfect than everything that is ordinary about me and you.

In the creative process there is the father, the author of the play; the mother, the actor pregnant with the part; and the child, the role to be born.

There's things that I can do as an actor that I couldn't do in any other form of life and I've got a strange personality. But film requires strange people, so I've got a nice comfy home.

I'm really lucky because my goal, as an actor, is to disappear into the characters that I'm playing.

You've always got to have an imagination in the game we're in but it explodes on this. You get to try the costumes on before you start and feel the weight of them, which is great. But then you're opposite some of the greatest actors in the world and away you go. You find your imagination takes over without you really even thinking about it.

An actor wants to get up every day and they can't think of anything particularly more fun to do than getting into a made-up situation and living it out as if it's real.