Cuba Gooding Jr. Quotes

I'm more interested in knowing my cues than my lines. If you know what your cues are, then you know what your reaction is going to be to them. Acting is about reacting, and if I can kind of purely react, that's easier for me.

If it seems like you're doing work when you're acting, then you're doing something wrong.

Good acting is thinking in front of the camera. I just do that and apply a sense of humor to it. You have to trust the audience to get it.

The most vital thing for an actor to deliver a great performance is to be honest to the role he or she is playing.

Acting is about being in the moment and audiences are smart to know what is authentic and what is not.

With acting, you have to just tell the truth in each moment.

On some level in acting, what you're trying to find is truth, because when it's true is when it's also funny.

As an actor, you try to bring as much of yourself to a part to try and create a feeling of authenticity and emotional truth and resonance.

A lot of people think theatre must be much harder work than film, but anything histrionic or superfluous gets seen on camera so you have to work to distil it into a complete sense of what's true.

Acting to me is always reacting.

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.

Acting is not about dressing up. Acting is about stripping bare. The whole essence of learning lines is to forget them so you can make them sound like you thought of them that instant.

There's the truth to every moment that you have to bring to every scene, but you have to understand the tonality of the film before you begin, which isn't something that's instinctual to me.

I think that acting involves doing your job so well that you are able to help the viewer identify with the character.

For any role, I pretty much always go to the script, first and foremost.

I'm the sort of actor who likes to talk about what we're going to do.

It's sort of the most important thing for acting, is to listen to the person you're dealing with.

For the actors, the talent is to serve the demands that I ask of them, to do it with naturality and truth, and to be honest when we were terrified.

The art of acting is to pitch good. You do the pitching and hope that the other person catches the ball and does some good pitching back to you.

I'm always looking, as an actor, for activities. I think it's far more interesting to watch what people do than what they say. You always want to watch behavior, because the dialogue as written by our illustrious leaders is great. Eminently playable.

Being an actor in movies is a lot about the power of your imagination and making the circumstance real to you so the audience will feel that it's real.

As an actor, one's role is very much to respond and react to the situation within the context of the character and his world.

Good acting is about being as natural and calm as possible. These days producers have such definite ideas that you have to be prepared to do whatever they ask.

All actors do that. Should do that and do that. For the most part. I say all actors. I'm exaggerating, but you know who does and who doesn't. Vince is a wonderful young actor who knows his work and did a beautiful job on this film.

I look at scripts really for whether they can be moving or penetrate some kind of truth. You are constantly chasing that feeling as an actor when every part of a production comes together.