When I was in acting class, we did a lot of really serious scenes, and we didn't do comedic scenes. I felt like doing those scenes, it didn't come out of my mouth the right way. I don't know if it's because my voice is different, or what it is about me, but it just seemed a little off.

Acting to me is a very organic art form and you just go and do it. And I like to direct the same way that I like to be directed. Let me bring in what I want to bring in, and if something's wrong, just tell me about it and I'll make some corrections or adjustments. And that's what I do.

I've definitely had some tough schoots. I'd say everything that I've done has had some sort of challenge that I've had to overcome. But it's the most satisfying feeling once you have and that's what I love about acting, sort of signing on to it knowing that it's going to be challenging.

I approach every film I do in the same way, whether it's an action film or not an action film. I guess if a certain physicality lends itself to action, but I started acting before I reached puberty. I was 7 years old when I started acting. It wasn't until I became a bouncer in New York.

I got into acting for the chance to be many different people and many different characters. I love hiding in a role and doing the research. If there is an opportunity to change my body, I will change my body. I'll slip in and disguise myself in a role. That is a really big treat for me.

When I first went to acting school, they made me lose my accent, which is very upsetting for me. The first day of Shakespeare class, I remember the professor was like, 'Oh, boy. Oh no, no, no, no. No, no, no,' and sent me to a voice and speech class to get rid of the accent immediately.

I do research. I do emotional sort of Method work. Somehow it’s a huge mishmash of things that becomes my own acting process and my own way of navigating through something. But ultimately the desire is to be honest, and for that truth to bleed through into your work and onto the screen.

Honestly, as hard a profession as acting is, I think music is even harder. Acting, you're like a leech, because someone else does the hard part for you. They write it for you, then the director tells you what to do. You really just need to know how to pay attention, follow instructions.

I think sometimes soap acting gets an unfair label for being bad and over the top. The lessons I learned there were so valuable. Seeing yourself every day on television, you learned what worked and didn't work, what was bad acting and what wasn't. Memorizing scripts became second nature.

Mads Mikkelsen’s acting is very subtle, precise, nuanced, so he brings something completely different to the character. If you compare Mads’ Hannibal to Anthony Hopkins’ for example. Not to mention that Mads Mikkelsen is very handsome and sexy, so he brings that to the character as well.

I did swimming, gymnastics, dance, and the acting was just a small part. I didn't have pushy parents; it wasn't forced upon me. They just said, 'See if you like it. If you do, great; if you don't, don't worry about it.' I was really fortunate to have that guidance and supportive parents.

I definitely have a tendency to only see the blemishes of things, and see lots of things about my acting that I don't like. I think I've gotten a little easier on myself, or at least a little more usefully critical of myself. I think before, I just couldn't take looking at myself at all.

Acting is fun and I refuse to get involved in the semantics and the politics of strategy and breaking out of something or doing something because you need to do something else. For me it's all about what fuels my soul and if I'm passionate about a screenplay then that's what I'll do next.

At some point you have to stop acting as though life is happening to you and acknowledge the ways you are happening to it. Once you take responsibility for your side of the street, you grant yourself the power to improve every aspect of your life by simply acting and behaving differently.

Acting is a great way to make a living, especially when I consider what my alternatives were and probably still are. I mean, you are only making movies. It is a lot less pressure than being a surgeon; although it seemed like the only other thing that I was qualified for was manual labour.

I love acting. I love stage work, more than anything. It's just live. It's right there in front of you. If you make a mistake, they know it and you know it. I won't do anything where I feel like I'm just making a fool out of myself. By doing that, I'm able to rise to my highest potential.

For me, I need to be able to show up on set and fart around and goof around. If I can have that, when I'm not acting, then when I'm acting I can go however deep and dark and bad I need to. I developed that more with 'Breaking Bad' because I've never worked on anything as dark for as long.

There was only one elective at my college for acting, but thank God for that elective because we had a great teacher who introduced me to the Meisner technique for acting. Once I read that book, I said, 'Wow, if I could do that and have that honest moment on stage, that would be amazing.'

I once read a quote that I think was Michelle Pfeiffer in an article, who said that she thought people went into acting because maybe if you could convince millions of people to like you, you will finally like yourself, approve of yourself. I don't know if that may have been a part of it.

I saw 'Taxi Driver,' and 'Taxi Driver' kind of saved my life. The scene where Robert De Niro is looking at himself in the mirror saying, 'You talkin' to me? You talkin' to me? Who the hell else are you talkin' to?' That's the scene that changed my life by changing my attitude about acting.

Why would anyone want to be famous, certainly not me. My only goal in an acting career is to be able to work full time as an actor, filmmaker. When I get to that level, which I will, in this business where I can spend one hundred percent of my time honing my craft, then I will be complete.

There is a universal element in man which he can assert by so acting as if the purpose of the Universe were also his purpose. It is the function of the supreme ordeals of life to develop in men this power, to give to their life this distinction, this height of dignity, these vast horizons.

The world is full of people with different characters and temperaments. We all have a dark side, a tendency to manipulate, and aggressive desires. The most dangerous types are those who repress their desires or deny the existence of them, often acting them out in the most underhanded ways.

Wrestling has to be more aggressive. It has to be bigger; it has to translate to the back of a football stadium. With acting, when that camera is up close, they can see your nose hairs twitch, and you have to pull back everything for it not to look clownish. There is that different mindset.

I'm really focused and committed to teaching now. Maybe when I'm about 30, which is in 10 years, I would like to consider doing something like speech therapy. That's what I really would like to do. I could go and do that now but it's not my drive at the moment. My drive is acting right now.

I would say the film world has stopped operating as one. We have divided it into Hindi movies, Bengali movies, Tamil movies and so on. Earlier, there was only one channel and we all knew what was going on. Today, it is hard to keep track of programmes due to the advent of regional channels.

I got the acting bug back because I felt like all of a sudden maybe after all these years, maybe I might have something to offer again. I walked away from it after 'Signs' because I just felt I was a bit stale and it wasn't ringing my bells, so I focused on directing, writing and producing.

I certainly very much enjoy acting, but I am open to anything really. I think it's important when you have those moments in life when you are not attached to something, and you are not quite sure what the next phase of your journey is going to look like, that you don't pigeon-hole yourself.

I knew that I needed to do something that I desperately loved. There was a period where I did question if it was acting because I knew that I would be making things hard on myself. I knew that there was going to be a little bit of a hullabaloo because of my dad being who he is and all that.

My job when I'm acting in a movie is very limited to playing a role. I'm not evaluating somebody. I'm only evaluating them insofar as they're interacting with me, but I'm not evaluating their skill set and I don't watch the movies, so I'm not aware of the way they're putting things together.

When you do a four-camera sitcom, everything is a little schtickier. It’s not necessarily that you pick up bad habits, but there is just a very specific way of acting that you fall into on those kinds of multicamera shows, and you have to break those habits when you go in to do other things.

I love going to work, doing acting. I love when I'm done with a movie or a TV show. I love hitting the road or being in the studio or going on tour. That's what I get off on. I don't need to have my business in the press and all that stuff. I'm pretty low key. It's all about the work for me.

Large multinational corporations, often acting through their industry lobbies, exert a powerful influence on the formulation of domestic rules and on their application - but their influence on supranational institutional design is even larger because it faces practically no opposition there.

I was aware that I was acting atrociously but I couldn't stop myself. Rarely had I behaved in such a manner. But I guess when we're feeling lonely in life, we attack those who actually do love us. It's one of the things that characterizes human nature and can be summed up in one word: FLAWED.

I grew up in a town with just under three hundred people in Western Australia. When you think about being six hours outside the second most isolated city in the world, which is Perth, and then you think about the town that I'm from, which is called Southern Cross, acting is not a possibility.

I realized that a dancer's life is very short and I had so much of a creative energy in me that I needed outlets to do other things so that's when I started acting more and it all kind of blended together. When you're on stage you're acting and you're dancing, it started blended together now.

Sometimes you're watching a great film actor, and if you stand 10 feet away from them, you're like, "God, they're terrible. They're not doing anything." And then you see the close-up and it's so nuanced and so much expression is happening. They were acting for that camera and for no one else.

There are some actors who are very good at developing things, who have... 'things in the pipeline.' I am abysmal at that kind of thing, loathe it, and am a terrible planner. Unless I'm showing up on the set and acting, I prefer to have nothing to do with the actual business of being an actor.

I know this may come as a shock to most of you, but I've decided to quit acting. I will not be auditioning for anything anymore, and if I get offered something like a role in a movie or a commercial or something, I will graciously turn it down. It's been great, but its just not for me anymore.

Paperwork, cleaning the house, dealing with the innumerable visitors who come all through the day, answering the phone, keeping patience and acting intelligently, which is to find some meaning in all that happens-these things, too, are the works of peace, and often seem like a very little way.

I directed a short series for Hulu called 'Paloma,' and being in an editing room, I learned a lot about acting. It gave me a new bolt of energy in terms of my interest in filmmaking because it made me realize how collaborative filmmaking can be and also that you're not just limited to one job.

I do both music and acting at the same time. To me they are both really important parts of how I express myself and understand myself in the world. I don't ever want to have to choose one over the other in any sort of grand sense of things. Obviously with scheduling you wind up making choices.

Writing is harder than acting. I enjoy acting for just the brevity with which you can be in the experience of doing it. Writing is kind of more satisfying in that you're creating a world and doing something that feels bigger, but it's very time consuming and has a higher threshold for failure.

Here is something no real celebrity will ever tell you: film acting is not very fun. Doing the same thing over and over again until, in the director's eyes, you 'get it right' does not allow for very much creative freedom... In terms of sheer adrenaline, film has absolutely nothing on theater.

It's always very exciting to collaborate and work with people who are masters at what they do. When I decide to learn new things, I always choose to learn from the best, so I can become one of them. It is the same with acting. When you are around other talented people, it can only bring you up.

I see writing and acting as different parts of the same continuum. Writing is better for intense emotion. If you're very angry about something, you shouldn't present it as strongly when you're acting. But if you're really angry and writing about it, that's the best way to get it out and across.

Home gigs can be hard because it's an odd collision. More than anything, I feel self-conscious when my family are in the audience. I'm doing this job which is not quite acting - part of it is me, part performance. You're presenting a cartoon of yourself to people who know you as a line-drawing.

I've just been very excited that over the years I've constantly had those types of different experiences. I like staying a little bit like acting school, not experimental, necessarily, but just fun. I have the best job in the world: I pretend for a living. You can't get too precious about that.

Vin Diesel is crazy, and when I say crazy, I mean it in a good way. He's crazy about Latinos, and he's not even a Latino. He even wants to speak Spanish. I told him we should do a song together, and he said he was shy. But I said, 'I'm no actor, but I'm acting in front of you. I wasn't scared.'

I think it's a shame when you come across young actors and musicians who haven't had the time to learn their craft. It doesn't matter if it's acting or music, you really have to learn how to do it from the bottom up because unless you have a great work ethic... fame is a terrible thing to have.

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