Theatrical Preparation Quotes

When I was prepping for my Broadway debut as Romeo, it really hit me that I had never done that. I had trained at drama school for three years in my late teens to early 20s, and I'd studied Shakespeare, of course, but I hadn't actually performed it. So to do something like Romeo for my first Broadway role was a challenge.

During rehearsals I am confronted by things very mysterious. I have terrific fights with inner demons, and it's more painful than it ever was.

When the show starts, I am in my SpongeBob stance, and I walk like SpongeBob, and the first step that I take, I am SpongeBob.

One day, out of irritation, I said, you know all of those years with the Royal Shakespeare Company, all those years of playing kings and princes and speaking black verse, and bestriding the landscape of England was nothing but a preparation for sitting in the captain's chair of the Enterprise.

For me, as an actor, with any character I'm playing, wardrobe brings a whole other aspect. Once I have the clothing on, it helps the transformation.

As an actor you make choices that are either right or wrong, and you find the ones that are right for you. As an understudy, the choices have been made, so you have to make those choices right. Going into the role, you can't really question it.

My life feels, week to week, incomplete to the level of being pointless if I am not in preparation for the next play or, ideally, into it.

Before shooting, I prepare with the actors much more like it's a theater play than a movie. Apparently, that way of working is very unusual.

Some actors start with the right shoes. I start with the right hats.

Ninety percent of the preparation we do as actors is just jive. It doesn't do anything.

It's hard to turn my internal dialogue off from that character I become.

I don't think I'm an actor who takes their characters home with him. But I certainly do take the preparation home.

If I had different parents who were in it for the money, I might have a different perspective. But they really are artists; they intelligently approach each character and prepare in every sense of the word. I grew up in a world that had great discipline.

It's always important to try and get a real sense of the world around my characters. I especially think it helps actors.

Rehearsals are set up so that you find out all the nuances about your character. You never want to beat yourself up. It's about finding the right direction, and most of the time, the right direction is not what you think is the right direction. That's why the director's there: to guide you there.

The make up took about an hour to put on, but the wig was a thing that bothered me more than anything else.

Well, obviously, as soon as I'd finished the script I read a lot of books on Winston Churchill, and started to gain weight and really prepare emotionally, mentally and physically for the role.

Now I'm going to put my eyelashes on and stretch my legs out and do a show.

I try to encourage actors to work harder off screen because that's where you find things.

Sometimes it takes me six months before I find out what a line means, even if the writing is superficial... To do a play right, really, I'd like to take two years of rehearsal. You study the character by living with him.

Some actors might just do one thing, and another actor does another thing. I do an awful lot of preparation with the script, really. What I do is repeat the script, over and over and over again. Through that, it's almost like it seeps into my enamel. I'm reading all the characters, as well as my own. That is where the bulk of my preparation goes into.

I don’t like to rehearse. And I couldn’t understand how you could go through eight weeks of rehearsal, without exhausting every possibility. To the point where, you know, you would just lie gasping on the floor!