Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Sometimes you find yourself digging around for something useful, and you don't necessarily know what it is until you find it. Sometimes it's a word from a book that you read every day.
I was devastated when they stopped making sailors' pants with bell bottoms. There's something sort of spirited about the way they affected a man's gait. They project something good-natured.
There's kind of no rhyme or reason to what is appealing to any given actor. It just is, or it isn't. It's kind of like dating. You either connect to someone or you don't. You can't really say why.
The things I love about this business the most, is that it is a challenge trying to prove to everyone - including yourself - that you can do something different than what people think you're capable of.
There's something particular about the way Los Angeles feels in the summertime. It slows down and is hazy and dreamy, and you can put on certain music and go for a drive and be totally sober but feel stoned.
I've always enjoyed disappearing into a crowd in New York. As an actor, I love to spy, and it's hard to be a good spy if everyone is looking at you. Also, I'm pretty shy. I don't really like a lot of attention.
It's just a dream of the struggling actor to just have a proper shot - not just in a film that people will see, but with a character that's rich and complicated and that you can show you're capable of taking on.
There are people who have really high expectations for what we're doing. I have to not think about that so that I can be free and play around every day and not feel like I have to get it right. You want to be loose.
Obviously, as an actor, you have to embrace your imagination all the time, but when you're doing one of these films, you have to embrace your most childlike imagination - a sense of wonder and uninhibited playfulness.
Can't remember a time when I didn't want to be an actor... though it felt like something I couldn't do until I grew up. I mean, I knew kids could be actors - I recall seeing them on my dad's shoots and getting jealous.
When you are the kid of an actor, it's always a very inviting world. Everyone is nice to you, the hair and make-up people braid your hair and play with you, and the costume department makes outfits for your teddy bears.
What's comforting about coming from a family of actors is I don't have to explain the struggle. I can just sigh to my sister, 'I had a bad one,' and she'll know exactly the profound audition humiliation I am describing.
I think everything happens organically. You mine for clues. It's all immersive, and stuff you can use comes out of that immersion. I don't really like to wear wigs in movies because I like to look like the character all the time.
Being interviewed is an odd experience for me because I was an actor a long time before anyone ever asked me a question about myself. When I started being interviewed, I definitely felt I was being asked to defend or explain myself.
I love that feeling. I guess I love escaping my life, really. I love going into another world and feeling for this amount of time that this is it, this is the world I'm going to live in. You feel it more during the rehearsal process.
About 10 minutes before I found out that I had landed 'Fantastic Beasts', I got a residual check in the mail for zero dollars. On the check it said 'Advice Slip.' And I was like, 'Well, what's the advice? Go into another line of work?
I think that when you are struggling as an actor, you imagine that if things were to pan out, everything in your life would change, But really, it's not so different. You're still pursuing good work. You still panic that you're doing it all wrong.
I feel like most actors just dig and dig and work and work in whatever way they do to try to do as much as they can to portray a character in the limited time they have to play it, whether it's six months or one month or one week of work, you know.
The only way my mother's beauty really affected me was that I always assumed that someday I would look like her. Then, late in my teens, I looked at a photo of her when she was younger than I was then, and I realised, no, it's never going to happen.
The best way to honor real people when you play them is to try to tell the story of their dynamics and the struggles that they're dealing with rather than lose sight of the connections and personal relationships, and do a really good job at an accent.
Acting is a community where you come in and out of each other's lives. I'm slightly envious of the Golden Age of Hollywood. It must have been frustrating to be owned by the studio, but it was also like being in a company, working with the same people, and that appeals to me.
If you have a famous parent, you know that being famous doesn't make you superior to anyone else. It just means people smile at you more. Everyone was fawning all over my father, but of course, the way you look at your parents when you're a teen is often with a... more critical eye.
My first memory of the Harry Potter series was my little brother just falling into those books and not resurfacing until he was done. That J.K. Rowling got an entire generation reading is extraordinary - I'm amazed, thrilled, and proud to now be portraying one of that phenomenal writer's characters.
What I love about the way they both [Paul Thomas Anderson and Joaquin Phoenix] work is that all of the monkey business is on film. There's no monkey business outside of the monkey business of making the movie. There's no ego bullshit, there's no wasted energy. It's all directed at the story and that's rare.
You kind of wake up in the morning, and you don't see anybody but these actors until you go home at night and pass out and do it again. So it's structured a lot like the process when you're making a film. You just kind of get in that tunnel vision. I like that. I like when the rest of the world kind of quiets.
I think connecting to a character is like connecting to any human being - either you like them or you don't. You might not be able to list the reasons why you love your best friend or what attracted you to them; it's just something that you feel - a connection, an understanding, or a curiosity that makes you want to get to know them.
Sometimes we'll walk into a set, and I'll think, 'Oh, this film doesn't look like this.' You know, 'cause I read the script, and I saw it in my head in some other way. Which is a lot like what happens when they're writing a movie that's based on a book - I'm like, 'Ah! He doesn't have a beard.' You have these visions in your head about it.
I think there's an assumption when you have a parent in the business that you're given some kind of a cheat sheet at an early age. Some kind of upper hand or some kind of advanced understanding of how the whole thing functions - maybe how to operate within it. I never felt I received that cheat sheet and grew up pretty removed from the business.
We live in such hypersexualised yet totally prudish times. People have this expectation about everyone else's relationship to their own bodies.'Surely you must have shame about your body? Surely what's scariest for you as actor would be to stand in a room naked?' Believe me, I've been in so many more terrifying situations as a performer than that.
I don't want to be a basket case on set. I try to sort of quiet all of that, all those thoughts, kinda just let yourself be aware of them when you're preparing to do the work but then once you get there you have to feel as free as possible. Anything that I perceived as something that ran the risk of stressing me out, I just left outside the studio doors because I didn't want to undermine myself.