Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
When something's wrong, even though you're the one doing it, you shouldn't feel defensive about it. It's hard because you have to protect yourself as a person in your life, but you can't protect yourself as an actor. You have to just take criticism.
Yeah, you know, if I'm having an emotional scene I do like to go off and be by myself; not to say that I'm a method actor or anything like that, but for scenes like that that are more emotional, I do like to take that night off and not be so social.
If you're a great documentary filmmaker, it doesn't necessarily mean that you're a great narrative filmmaker. There are fantastic documentary filmmakers that can't direct actors. You don't have to do that in a documentary, if it's a real documentary.
Every day, every scene, you were like, "My god. I'm doing a scene with Brian Cox today and then I'm onto a scene with Stephen Rea." For us young actors, I think we were all very, very star-struck and impressed by the caliber of everyone who came out.
There is a shortage of hard R. It was the story and the character. He's never played a character like this and so that was the thing that really won him over. The story itself, on the surface - Patrick and I love actors almost in a geeky kind of way.
If you're a young person who wants to become an actor, it's really important to walk into a casting room with a sense of yourself and some life experience. You can really delight a room and have them already choose you before you've even said a word!
I think I enjoy working obviously as a lead, but also you know I feel I'm also a character actor as well, so I enjoy approaching various projects in all sort of capacities. Any film I have been able to do I feel very fortunate to have been a part of.
I hear about actors being exterior actors and actors being instinctual actors and I always think it's crap. Anybody who knows anything about it knows that good actors do both - they do inside-outward and they do outside-inward. You can't not do both.
I don't want to be quoted as 'Tom Hiddleston, psychologist says...' But there is a psychological aspect to being an actor. We are particular students of human nature - not every actor is, of course, but that's what fascinates me about being an actor.
I know from my own experience that great films and great actors can have a really big influence on you. There is a place for art in the world, and if you're lucky enough to be good at something and to keep being given work, it's not such a bad thing.
If no one on the movie has met me before or knows me, that's the easiest. I don't do a lot of things that don't relate to being the person. I will try to keep it going for my other actors. I want them to do the least amount of pretending as possible.
I think that you can't make a movie without a script. But you also can't make movies without actors. You also can't make movies without technicians. And there has to be just one person in charge of everybody, and to me that one person is the director.
To me if there's an achievement to lighting and photography in a film it's because nothing stands out, it all works as a piece. And you feel that these actors are in this situation and the audience is not thrown by a pretty picture or by bad lighting.
You can't have an actor where the audience says, aw, that poor, sweet guy. You got to get somebody who's, like, nondescript in a way or just somebody that looks a little like they should get it. So this is all I learned actually learn from Lucy [Ball].
I try to stay out of the spotlight as much as humanly possible, because I think that when actors, whether or not they've chosen it or it has been thrust upon them, are living very public lives, it affects your ability to get lost in their performances.
There's something about the evolution of television where it evolved from to the things that we're now watching and loving. It evolved from film writers, film actors, and I think gradually people are easing themselves into the amount of time they have.
I learn a lot with actors that I don't think are good. Every experience shapes you. I've had experiences with actresses - and I say actresses because there's just a woman thing - that have achieved what she's achieved, by means that I can't understand.
We have little bits of comedy throughout our films but this is like a full-on comedy. I had great time. It was fun to do a comedy and see a lot of the people I worked with on our previous films and meet some new actors. It was a good experience for me.
I feel that in order to truly be an actor, you have to differentiate yourself and your roles, and you have to constantly challenge yourself. I'm not interested in just doing glitzy movie after glitzy movie and being on the cover of Us Weekly every day.
There's a lot of great stuff on television and that's very appealing to actors who want to work, who do good quality and high quality work. But you're always concerned that the time demands on television will interrupt or interfere with your film work.
I was raised to be in service to something larger than myself. A lot of actors concentrate on what they will get out of the profession, rather than what they can offer it. The way I see it, if you come with something to offer, you can offer it forever.
For no. 1, it's great writing, super writing. The second thing is that it's great chemistry with all the actors. We just all got along from the very start. Very get-go, we all got along. We just - it was just like we were all meant to be there together.
A really great actor, in a lucky performance, can transform himself or herself. I've seen actors do that. But often it's a mechanical transformation, which isn't as interesting, and you've got to be careful how you go about something like that, I think.
A lot of times, actors give so much power to the producers and the producing companies because, quite frankly, they have it. But we don't take the limited power that we have, which the power you initially have is to say 'no.' But 'no' in a positive way.
Most scripts are written to be green lit. They're not written to be acted. And a lot of writers with the greatest intention in the world don't write for actors. They don't understand the architecture of what an actor needs to get from point A to point B.
I'm not necessarily a good actor, but once people start saying you are, you are. And I know that that's a truism, and there's obviously nothing important in that particular statement, but it's really about the fact that people create you as a good actor.
I've been poked fun of throughout my career by fellow actors for my notes that I take. I have spiral notebooks that I carry with me on every project I do, and I take notes just so that if I have to relive a scene, if I have to go back, I know what I did.
If you want to be watched 24 hours a day in everything you do, you can't turn that around. You can't wake up three years later and say, 'Stop bothering me, I'm a serious actor,' if all you've done is wear certain clothes and show up half-loaded at clubs.
The actor has the advantage - or the liability - of knowing, "It's going to be my face up there on the frickin' screen, so I better keep my wits about me. Nobody's going to care that I was bad because I was not happy. They're only going to know I'm bad."
I come from a very small rural village in northern Germany, and being an actor never even seemed like a possibility. I thought you would have to live in a big city, or be discovered somewhere, or be born into an artistic family, which I certainly wasn't.
This word gets overused in describing actors but I think it applies to Mike [Tyson] in this case - he was totally fearless. He jumped in and played with us comedically and improvised a lot. A lot of jokes in those scenes with him are from him improvising.
Few rash of any modern nation have a proper sense of an aesthetical whole; they praise and blame by parts; they are charmed by passages. And who has greater reason to rejoice in this than actors, since the stage is ever but a patched and piecemeal matter?
I've been on sets where the turnaround is so fast and the budget so small that the actors have been asked to speed things up and save money by changing in the public toilets. There's no room for vanity at times like that. It's the best way: get on with it!
For me to want to be an actor was an improbable idea. I wasn't beautiful or pretty in any conventional way. I wasn't an ingenue at 22. But I was always certain of it and certain of its power. I felt the power when I went to the theater at 9, 10, 12 and 14.
I put steam on the table by being an actor. That is how I live. The longer I live, the more expensive it becomes. So I do my work. And I can't be immensely picky. How many beautiful scripts come in one's lifetime? I have had more than anybody, practically.
I had to learn that a good actor, like an iceberg, reveals only a small part of his ability on the surface. You suggest; you don't serve on a platter. You hold back. You don't expose it all to view. That's the way to put the audience's imagination to work.
That's one of the reasons I wanted to be an actor, to be like them. And there they were at my table, all talking about how nervous they were, about the lines, and so forth. No matter how big you get, you still have the same kinds of anxieties and so forth.
I did short film with Damian Lewis from Homeland, that was a really incredible experience. He's one of the best actors I've ever worked with. Even though that's a short film for Jaguar that's really, in essence, a commercial, it didn't feel like it, at all.
If the film isn't in some way going to study behavior then I'm not interested, but the reason why I'm not interested in directing in film is that it would take me, to be as good an artist as I feel I am an actor, it would take me another 35 just to conquer.
It's funny when people ask an actor what they want to play next, because you don't get to decide what you play. I don't know. I can only say this: I don't want to and have no interest in playing a plastic surgeon. That's for sure. I'm open to anything else.
I want to work with great directors. I want to work on good material with good actors. I've probably done 20 movies at this point and a lot of independents. It's been an incredible ride and I love it and I'm just going to keep going and doing what I'm doing.
Directors don't get to see other directors at work - they're the only one on the set. I've met directors who've asked me what another filmmaker is like. So, there's probably nobody better placed to make all the comparisons and to pick up stuff than an actor.
I was just excited by the whole prospect of working in a television series in Hollywood. I had never anticipated that as an actor I would ever end up here. It may be some sort of fantasy I'd thought about from time to time, but it was completely unrealistic.
No one else in my family is an actor or aspires to be, and most of my friends aren't actors. Most of my friends are the people that I grew up with back in Georgia. It's really helpful to be surrounded by a world that's bigger than the entertainment industry.
[on whether he harbored any resentment at his forced retirement from the stage after he was fired by Britain's National Theater] I should be soaring away with my head tilted slightly toward the gods, feeding on the caviar of Shakespeare... An actor must act.
We knew, very early on, that we had to be very, very clear that directors need to speak to actors and actresses and be very clear about what is expected, and find out whether they're comfortable with that. Wardrobe has to be in place. There have to be checks.
It is only when an actor feels that his inner and outer life on the stage is flowing naturally and normally, in the circumstances that surround him, that the deeper sources of his subconscious gently open, and from them come feelings we cannot always analyse.
To be an actor in the society in Israel, you have to be ten times better than the Israeli Jews. To get the roles in mainstream theater or to get any role, not typecast as an Arab. And also if you are ten times better, not all the time you get the opportunity.
There are the jobs you get that do something for your confidence, like "I can do this with my life" kind of thing. And then, there are the jobs that maybe bring a certain level of awareness about you as an actor where other people feel like they can hire you.
I never consciously said, 'I want to be an actor.' It sounds stupid, but it's kind of like being a painter or something. You don't say, 'From today on I'm going to be a painter.' It's not something conscious - you've just been painting pictures all your life.