Theatrical Immersion Quotes

I was never not in a show from ages 11 until 18. It was a great creative atmosphere but also a professional kind of atmosphere. When I finally went into the professional world, I felt ready. I was prepared for work.

Rehearsing a scene beds a role into you. But sometimes, if you over-rehearse it without unearthing any new meaning in it, you can suddenly forget your lines. You realise that you are on a stage, not in the real world. The scene's emotional power, and your immersion in it, disappears.

When I closed in "King Lear" I went into a period of depression for about three weeks, and every actor I've talked to who's ever played a major, major Shakespeare role has done this.

What do I need a movie for? The stage is on a higher level in every way, and a more satisfying medium. Movies, by comparison, are like calendar art next to great paintings. You can't really do very much in movies or in television, but the stage is such an anarchistic medium.

I remember seeing Janet McTeer in A Doll's House. My grandmother took me and we had seats in the very back row, but her performance was so powerful - it was very accessible. I felt like I was much closer than I was.

Central to being an actor is pretending, and the adventure of it all. That's why you become a junkie for different kinds of situations.

It's important that a film is loud and I hope many people agree. You should be inside of a film when you go into a theater. It should surround you, envelope you, so you can live inside a dream.

I mean there’s a certain finality about a movie, when it’s done it’s done – that raised eyebrow in that moment will always be that raised eyebrow. Whereas a play only lives as a blueprint for a performance on any given night. There’s a reason you can eat popcorn and watch a movie and you can’t do that in the theatre. Theatre you have to lean in, you have to tune your ear to the stage and participateI respond to heat. And blood. And humanity. The cold experience is not for me. I’ve always enjoyed all the real people in a room together in the theatre.

You get to know a character that you play on-stage in a pretty profound way over a length of time. I don't want to sound highfalutin and say you become the character, you just start bringing more and more of yourself to the part until the character and actor, it's hard to tell them apart. It's some weird amalgam. In film, because of the period of time, I don't know that you ever get that deep into it.

To me, the theatre - I don't like to say it, but I'll say it - is a temple in a kind of way, where human beings go to be elevated.

It was very natural for me to want to disappear into the theatre, I am really very shy.

As an actor, the last thing you ever want to end up on is just a procedural show where you're just a talking head. There's nothing worse than just spitting out words. Words interrupt performance. Performance is king in my world, when it comes to why I'm in this business.

I think that there is a real beauty to the live aspect of the theater, and the working with a director for a month on a script in the isolation of a room and really deeply delving into who are these people, what is the story we're telling, how do we want to tell it?

To enter a theatre for a performance is to be inducted into a magical space, to be ushered into the sacred arena of the imagination.

As soon as I leave the world [of the show], I want to turn around and come back. That's how real it is. As soon as I leave the theater I want to wake up and come back the next day and do it all over again. It's that much fun.

When I become a character in a movie or drama... I can think about the character only and not the complicated matters of my own life.

Too often in the theatre people can't wait for intermission to get some chocolate or something. But with Come Back, Little Sheba I just hope people leave feeling like they've spent a really good two-hours in that house with us.

One of the things I love about the theater is that no one can tell you to stop. Once you're onstage, it's three hours, and whether you're completely off or you're just horrendous, you've got to find a way to leave an impression. There's not that terrible thing that you get when you're making a movie, where you get in your car at the end of the day knowing that something you're not proud of was immortalized on film, and you can't fix it because they won't reshoot it.

Oh, I like going down the rabbit hole. You know, that's kind of my job. When you play Macbeth, you gotta dive down that one. The trick is figuring out how to do it with love and a sense of humor so you can pop back out again. But, kind of the actor's job is to go down the rabbit hole.

In the story, I think as an actor you're just trying to fit into the world.

I've kind of gone from TV series to TV series or project to project, and I've wanted to get back in a rehearsal room. I feel like there's that exploration process, in a way, that you get in phases on jobs but I do wish I had that time [at school].

I do not understand those who spend hours at the theater watching scenes between people whom they would not listen to for five minutes in real life.

There are parts that you can do them all your life, and no one knows you're even acting, and there are other parts which somehow - I think they say they 'pop' - people notice that you're in and you become an actor from the movies and people take you in a whole different way. Whether or not I can keep that ball rolling is another matter.

I wasn't a trained actor, I was trained in musical comedy theater, and when you do that, the audience is completely part of the thing. It's like Elizabethan theater. You play the scene, and then you turn - the audience is part of it.

It was only in the theatre that I lived