Daniel Mays Quotes

My approach to acting is that I am totally intuitive. I read the script and I get it. If I don't get it, I can't do it.

Obviously an actor draws on his own experience.

In every character you play, as much as you hate to admit it as an actor, but there's an element of you that you bring to it.

I suppose with any character that you play you always bring your personal experience to it. You always bring people that you know or that you've met and sort of - this is what I do, I mean, I don't know what anyone else does - but people that you know or that you've met that have affected you in certain ways, you bring into it.

Like any other actor, I draw on life experience.

My approach as an actor has always been the same, in that the greatest gift that you're ever going to have is your imagination because you're not going to have all life experiences. So you draw on things that are sort of close to it but you spend your time expanding on it or drawing something specific on whatever your situation is.

When you're an actor or any kind of artist, you use your life as something to draw from in every experience.

Writing and directing might be a red herring, and really I'm just re-examining what it is to act, to do it well and do it properly.

The interesting thing about acting is using all your own stuff and having some kind of personal catharsis while you're working.

How do I act so well? What I do is I pretend to be the person I'm portraying in the film or play.

If you're cast right you can actually just let yourself go because all your gestures will be right, all your intonations will be right because you just somewhere understand who this person is.

I live in the energy and rhythm of the character. To some degree, that's true of every actor I've worked with.

Acting is a symbiotic process, it is an amalgamation of many many things put together and when there is a call for action, that's when you surrender and the moment of truth comes out, that's when you perform. That is the process for every good actor.

As an actor, you go in your own personal life and pull from your personal life, so that's what I do.

Some people say, 'Do you have any theories on acting?' And I say, well maybe: I think you can start with zero and end with zero. You don't have to go anywhere, you don't have to go for the result.

When I do a character, I try to base it on someone I have met or an experience I've had.

I'm not a method actor per se, but if I'm playing a character that, at its core of its persona, has experiences I don't have, I try to search out and get firsthand experiences of similar sorts so I have something to fantasize about.

I love acting and really taking on another person, another life.

I tend to get comfortable with the dialogue and find out who the person is in the script and try to hit that. People are sort of independent of their occupations and their pastimes. You don't play a politician or a fireman or a cowboy - you just play a person.

I want to break into the acting industry. It's something I have a great deal of respect for; it's a passion of mine. It's so amazing, the differences between acting and being an athlete, but the one commonality is they both evoke emotion in the viewer. And those emotions are real. So I think that's pretty cool.

Good acting comes from finding the essence of a character.

As an actor, you always want to find a piece of who you are in every role you take on.

I see all these people talking about acting as a great spiritual thing. It's not. There's no great mystery to acting. It's a very simple thing to do, but you have to work hard at it. It's about asking questions and using your imagination.

I love theater work because of the immediate effect your performance has on the audience. And I love the repetition; I love getting on the same stage for more than a month and reciting the same lines, trying to make a small or large step towards an improvement in my acting.

Everything, I think, about acting is based on imagination.