Dominique McElligott Quotes

That's why I enjoy acting: getting in the mind of someone else.

We actors do this to pretend, to go into imaginary circumstances, so when the imaginary circumstance is of a different time, that just compounds the joy of doing what we do.

I'm coming from the notion that acting is an art. It is not a business. It is about building characters, not about selling personalities.

I studied method acting for four years and I'm a big believer in the idea that it's not about the actual experience itself. You don't have to go through exactly what this character has gone through.

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

Actors, their greatest tool, their greatest resource is imagination. You can take things, power objects, you can recruit your dreams, you can access your memories and get there. So the idea is not to act but to just be.

Every time you get on a stage or in front of a camera, the whole exercise is about imagination. You're constantly depicting something that doesn't exist, and trying to find the reality of it. Once you settle on that premise, everything else is a matter of degrees.

I find it easier to play someone who is so far from me because you create someone - you build this person based on the story and the script, with the director.

That's what acting is. You're pretending to be someone else.

The idea of transformation - playing something I'm not - is the bit I enjoy most about acting.

I don't have any training as an actor, but I guess I'm an intense pretender. When you read something over and over, it gets into you a little bit. You can't help but begin to feel it, even if you're a healthy person as I think I am.

To me, part of the fascinating profession of acting is to participate in all these strange situations, to try to understand all these interesting characters, fictitious or real, their human nature... It's extraordinarily fascinating.

A passion for any novel, and any character, can crystallise your ideas when you really need to be as open as possible as a performer.

I love the possibility that anything can happen in any moment with acting. That you have the opportunity to experience lives and adventures that you may not have otherwise.

I love to act because I love trying on other people's skin.

I see my job as an actor to be as good a channel as I can be. Acting is a gift, and I have respect for it.

You use your emotions to try and find them in the character that you're playing.

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

As much as I know people love the method and what you can draw out of yourself, a lot of acting is very imaginative.

If you have a very good concept of your character, you can snap into it.

What made me fall in love with acting, which is my life, was watching other people perform. It made me hunger to do that.

Acting is a nice childish profession - pretending you're someone else and, at the same time, selling yourself.

Actors are such wonderful creatures and such wonderful instruments. It's always different on the page or in my head. I hear it differently. I see it differently. And then, you give it to an actor, and it comes alive in a way that you didn't expect.

One of the things that makes you want to be an actor, speaking only for myself, is that there's something infantile about it. You're suspending disbelief, pretending and entering into a story world.

Acting is something that I really love when I am doing it, as it is interesting and fun to pretend to be someone else, but I don't ever miss it when I am not doing it.