Benedict Samuel Quotes

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.

Obviously an actor draws on his own experience.

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

When I'm given a role, I'm consumed by a passion to bring to life a character that exists only on paper. I mull over the character for days and internalise his feelings.

Some actors get by with behaving, not acting. You've got to sell the effect. I act more in the 'Nightmare' movies because it's not like me. I'm acting, not reacting.

Sometimes I think of movie acting as advanced pretend.

Don't think for a moment that I'm really like any of the characters I've played. I'm not. That's why it's called 'acting'.

I like acting; I like being lost in the creative process.

Acting is a mysterious process.

I act according to the requirements of the character, and if I try to play the role, then I play it truthfully. In my daily life, I'm a laid-back, peaceful guy. I'm just doing my job to act.

The actor cannot afford to look only to his own life for all his material nor pull strictly from his own experience to find his acting choices and feelings.

I've learned by watching films that inspired me and people who inspired me like Robert Redford and Paul Newman. I love old school acting. I love subtlety, and I also love being spontaneous, and that's really what works for me.

I know what I love about acting - and it's the creative process.

Maybe I'm secretly in my soul a method actor.

I'm a task-oriented actor. A pretender. And I try to invent my process anew each time I make a new project. So I frown on any method.

Actors, after all, dream.

Acting, and the privilege of being able to do it for a living, is so important to me. I don't turn up and just hope for the best. I really fret about it. I do my homework; I prepare myself for the experience of playing a particular character.

As an actor, the only thing you have is your instinct and your imagination.

For my money, when you're doing an on-camera performance, unless it's for something particularly stylised, you are, by and large, striving for naturalism.

For me, that is the craft of acting: literally creating something from nothing.

I know I sometimes come across as being quite dismissive about acting. But I'm not. It's like people reading their diaries in public. I don't want to talk about how I create characters. I find it self-indulgent.

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.

I think the two main tools actors have are the imagination of what other people have gone through, to connect with and through research, and there's one's own experience.

As an actor, I believe that acting is actually behaving truthfully under imaginary circumstances.

Actors will say, 'My character wouldn't say that.' Who said it was your character?