There are ways of avoiding becoming tabloid fodder and therefore giving people license to pry into your private life. And there's a distinction between being an actor and being a celebrity. You may become a celebrity through acting, but you don't need to do so.

In acting, you get to explore such an artistic side with different characters to research and learn and explore different things inside yourself and I do that anyway, so I might as well be doing something that I already do, as in a second nature to me, on film.

What I love about photography, and it's the same thing I love about acting, really, is that it forces you, like, right into the moment, where you can't be distracted, where you can't be, like, thinking about other things or ahead of yourself or behind yourself.

It's rare when you're actually making a movie and it feels like you're watching a movie in the theater. You feel like a surfer in a wave, catching the wave, going for it every time, there's electricity in the room, it doesn't feel like acting, you ride the wave.

This business of friendship was a curious thing, almost as difficult to learn as the busuness of acting. Sometimes you were expected to tell the truth, to express your thoughts and your feelings, and then other times what was wanted was a lie, a bit of disguise.

It is only because the majority opinion will always be opposed by some that our knowledge and understanding progress... it is always from a minority acting in ways different from what the majority would prescribe that the majority in the end learns to do better.

It's stressful to keep doing audition after audition after audition. You finish one and go to the next one, and you have to learn lines. For me, I have to work on my accent, so I was getting accent coaching and acting coaching. I wanted to make good impressions.

There's a rule in acting called, 'Don't play the result.' If you have a character who's going to end up in a certain place, don't play that until you get there. Play each scene and each beat as it comes. And that's what you do in life: You don't play the result.

For the first time, humanity is instituting a genuine instrument Kyoto Protocol of global governance,"..."By acting together, by building this unprecedented instrument, the first component of an authentic global governance, we are working for dialogue and peace.

I could count my modeling jobs on my hands and toes. When I graduated from college, I moved to New York specifically to study acting, and I needed to pay the bills, and it's better to make a couple thousand dollars in one day than to wait tables six days a week.

I'm not really a movie star. No matter what I do in acting, whether I'm good, how much work I get, whatever, I never will be a movie star. Because I never think of myself as one. You are a movie star because you think of yourself as a movie star and always have.

I think because I have quite a normal family and I'm bored with how normal my family is. I want to mess stuff up a bit. I chose the messed up characters because I find that that's acting. I want to explore emotions that you otherwise wouldn't be able to explore.

That's what's so satisfying about acting. You can come as prepared as you like, but there's no accounting for what's going to come at you from the other actor. That's part of the joy and the play of it. If you don't have that it's a different kind of performance.

Nobody in my family is in the show business, and none of my friends were. I went to a very academic school that actually - when I got to the point of wanting to pursue acting, they just had no idea how to do that, because all of their contacts were very academic.

Actually, acting turned out to be the perfect job for me, because I had a lot of different interests. I thought about being a priest at one point. I thought about being a teacher. I thought about being a lawyer. But I think acting is probably the best job for me.

It's difficult, if not impossible, to get away with anything false before the camera. That instrument penetrates the husk of the actor; it reveals what's truly happening - if anything, if nothing. A close-up demands absolute truth. It's a severe and awesome truth

I look back the old old ones [X-Files series], from the beginning, and I'm kind of mortified by my acting! But I'm kind of impressed by my enthusiasm. I'm just thankful that I got to become better at what I did, and that we didn't get cancelled in the first year.

I suppose that if I could have quit, I would have, because in those days I never wanted to be an actress, the acting was something to do while I waited for a chance to study writing and directing. But I guess I was just meant to be an actress. Because, here I am.

Being an actor is definitely not about sitting around on set and having a cigarette or something. It's about acting. The more you can audition, then that's the best thing ever because you learn so much and you get your face out there and you grow your confidence.

Obviously there are times with acting when exactly what is required is just going through the motions, and when doing nothing is the best thing. But at other times, you have to make that leap beyond the immediate environment of people putting up lights on the set.

I'm so not a performer, my drive to do [acting] is so different to other people - and I'm not discrediting that, they're born performers, they're people that you love to watch just be themselves. I like to be a little bit more in control. I like to make something.

I'm trying to find myself as a person, sometimes that's not easy to do. Millions of people live their entire lives without finding themselves. But it is something I must do. The best way for me to find myself as a person is to prove to myself that I am an actress.

Acting is kind of difficult to intellectualize - it's a far more visceral experience. It's really hard to be able to think about and then employ these kind of esoteric notions of this person's backstory and try to weave it in somehow. It's just kind of impossible.

I love actors and I understand what has to happen within a scene. Any scene is an acting scene and actors never act alone, so there has to be an interchange. If it's a dialog scene, if it's a love scene, it doesn't matter because you need to establish a situation.

When I read 'The Water Diviner,' I was having the same kind of visceral reaction that I would normally have acting in something. I believed that I was the only person that could tell this story the way it needed to be told. That's the real arrogance of a director!

Bob Fosse, even though he wasn't gay. He was certainly queer and had a huge effect on the 'Hedwig' film, as did Hal Ashby and Robert Altman, who had a weird butch queer feeling about him. His films almost flirted with camp but in an extremely realistic acting way.

All I have to do is be me on stage. But acting, I have to be someone else, and walk how they would walk and blink how they would blink. I used to talk about it bad like, 'Aw man, that person made $10 million a movie?' But now I understand why they do. I get it now.

Its different being a director. I suppose, especially if its a story youve written and you feel compelled to tell, in some ways its a lot easier than acting because youre orchestrating the piece. As an actor, sometimes youre trying to second-guess what people want.

I have a four year old and I'm telling you we did Nickelodeon last night and he embarrassed me. It was like one of those moments when I couldn't believe my kid is acting like this. I just had to just like walk away from him because he was really pushing my buttons.

It is necessary to recover the primeval force of the shock taking place at the moment when opposite a man (the viewer) there stood for the first time a man (the actor) deceptively similar to us, yet at the same time infinitely foreign, beyond an impassable barrier.

I'm acting for the same reasons I wanted to become a diplomat. I've thought about it a lot and concluded that I wanted to become a diplomat because it was a way to explore human nature. For the same reason that at one point in college, I wanted to be a sociologist.

Temperance, in the nobler sense, does not mean a subdued and imperfect energy; it does not mean a stopping short in any good thing, as in love and in faith; but it means the power which governs the most intense energy, and prevents its acting in way but as it ought.

As you climb of the organizational ladder, you have to redefine your role in the value chain from player to captain to coach to manager, and for some, to owner. These are different roles and you won't be able to succeed as a manager when you're acting like a player.

I couldn't function if I weren't allowed to stretch and do really different characters where I can change the whole "beingness" of that person. That's my pleasure in acting and has been since I was a kid. That's always been my pleasure to create complete characters.

I know so many acting careers that are deliberately kickstarted by a publicist placing a bit of rubbish in a newspaper. And I don't want that. If someone recognises me, I want it to be because they've seen me in something, not because they have seen me at something.

If you focus on what you want and you persevere, chances are you succeed. You know, that's what I found. It might not be in acting - it might be in business, financing, it might be in the arts, it might be in anything. But it's all about focusing and being inspired.

It's funny to think that when you get done with an acting job, you're considered unemployed. There are definitely times when those checks don't last forever. I went to college at a private school, and I racked up quite a bit of debt. I was very slow to pay them back.

I'll say initially acting was my first love, and that's what I pursued. But then, so far as even my first day on a film set, and just watching how things were set up, I just said, 'I think I want to be in charge.' I am very much type-A. I am a bit of a control freak.

It's a different kind of acting, this 'Law & Order' thing. They want two partners who can play off each other well and are fun to watch, but depth of character is not necessary in this job. Too much character gets in the way of the story. This is a very specific gig.

We all have loads of information. What an actor does is bring it to the surface. I jump without a net because that's how I am. The information comes out because I am brave enough to allow it. I'm not brave as a human being in everyday life. I'm brave when I'm acting.

An unforgettable experience happened on December 15, 1996 when I won the Supermodel contest while still in school. I was just seventeen years old then. Winning that competition was the turning point of my life. That's how I got into modeling and later started acting.

From an outsider's perspective, it's amazing what [Clint Eastwood] does. If he's not directing a film, he's acting in it, or rather he's composing the music for that film. His commitment to what he does is astounding for all of us to witness. It's inspiring, actually.

The actors make the film. They're the ones that take this theoretical movie that's in your head and make it real. The success of a film is entirely on their shoulders. I admire them, because acting is such a difficult thing to do, and I personally can't understand it.

All these fifty-year-old guys wearing baseball caps and shorts and acting like children. It winds me up. Men don't have to take responsibility anymore. Most of the guys I know would punch me on the nose for saying this, but maybe we do have to bring back conscription.

One of the great tools we use in acting is the idea of immediacy, that the audience gets to see you witness something apparently for the first time, so you create a lot of tools to kind of trick yourself into making it appear something is happening for the first time.

From the United States, Vietnam is looking for two things. One of them is a very stable and continuing to expand economic relationship. Secondly, they would like to see the United States remain in the - Southeast Asia, acting as a balancing power to balance out China.

[...] every time he forces himself to think before acting, it's her voice in his head telling him to slow down. He wants to tell her, but she's always so busy in the medical jet—and you don't just go to somebody and say, "I'm a better person because you're in my head.

I was never a villain on the stage. I always played strong, sympathetic types. My first stage role with a speaking part, believe it or not, was as a priest. It wasn't until I began acting in films that the producers and directors saw me primarily as a bizarre villain.

It's a great thing if you're a creative person and have some kind of acting or dance or singing, any art. I think it's great to be around people who support that and who are into it like you are, and you can have one big family and teachers who know what they're doing.

Taking a man's money without his consent, is also as much robbery, when it is done by millions of men, acting in concert, and calling themselves a government, as when it is done by a single individual, acting on his own responsibility, and calling himself a highwayman.

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