Michael Gambon Quotes

I play myself all the time, on camera and off. What else can I do?

You're never really playing yourself. You're always acting. It's an illusion that you're really playing yourself. The only time I'm playing myself is when I'm at home!

I'm not an actress who can create a character. I play me.

I do not want to play a character who is exactly like me.

The best advice my dad ever gave me is that acting is believing. Acting is not acting. It isn't putting on a face and dancing around in a mask. It's believing that you are that character and playing him as if it were a normal day in the life of that character.

Man is a make-believe animal: he is never so truly himself as when he is acting a part.

I'm not really an impersonator.

On every show that I have been on, I have played myself.

Some actors play themselves, don't they?

When you play a character, there's always a part of you. Like, you always bring out a side of you when you do another character.

Clint Eastwood, to me, is Clint Eastwood. He's great at being Clint Eastwood. But, I don't know how to be that guy. I just don't know how to be one person.

You have to play your characters, not like them.

Acting is like a Halloween mask that you put on.

When I present those clip shows and movie mistakes and things, the persona the writers adopt for me is unimpressed, superior, very sarcastic - I'm not any of that. I can do it, but that's not what I'm like.

Every character I play is me.

I play roles, but when I'm off stage, I always try to be myself.

When I am doing a fictional show, I become someone else. Reality shows keep you close to who you really are.

I play a character every day of my life, and I don't want to play a character as myself. They can judge me as an actress, not as a person. I'm not a spokeswoman for Anna.

Look up the word role in the dictionary and you'll see it means playing a part. That's why I call myself a real model.

Being an actor, you are recognized for being somebody else, whereas these books are distilled from me.

As actors, we get to hide. You can change your hair and your accent, and it's not you. You have tricks, these masks.

In the end, it's your job to own the role, and in the end, you are playing certain aspects of your own self, even.

Who I am on stage is very, very different to who I am in real life.

It's always the case, whenever you're doing someone real, how much you want to do an impression or a characterisation. If I was doing Churchill, or Gandhi - people know exactly how they talked, walked.

What once was an expression of who I was - acting - also became my hiding place.