Maria Bello Quotes

When you're an actor, you get your ideas from everywhere - even from someone on the street. We're total thieves!

I think that different actors go about their preparation differently, but when it comes to acting, I use my imagination.

I don't theorize too much. I sort of let the experience sink in, and I have to discover what the character is by doing it, and having those thoughts that she's thinking.

The thing about Brando was that I'd make these directions, and he'd walk away. He'd heard enough... to get the machine going.

I just love the process of working with other actors.

As actors, you play people who are not yourselves!

I find that the acting's getting easier - with experience, everything is more instinctual.

Actors tell stories and we play different characters, and not all of them are healthy.

Honestly, I'm a shallow performer. I just go with the text and feel my way around it. There's not a whole lot of shaping.

I certainly always do draw upon stuff in my life. You do that instinctively as an actor.

I don't separate Robert DeNiro's comedy from the serious stuff. The one thing I realize working with him in all of his work, is that he doesn't do anything unless something happens to him in scenes - unless something happens to make him react. He never came in with a set idea of how he was going to do it, he never came in with guns blazing. He would just show up and wait to see what happened.

I certainly am not a great believer in over-rehearsing between actors, and certainly not doing the dialogue too much.

The kind of acting that's wholly literary or cerebral is wrong. It's useless for me to have actors so much in their heads that they can't be organic.

I'm not a method actor. I can't even explain so much what I do.

A lot of the people I'm working with are not actors, or it's their first time in a movie. I'm not trying to shape performances, coax performances out of them. It's more like I want to put them in situations that naturally work or allow them to be themselves. If it's not happening, I'll just completely switch it up, rather than trying to make it work.

I'm fascinated with actors, and I've never quite understood the process.

What you're trying to do as an actor is somehow trick yourself into believing that these words have never been said, and so you've got to discover them for the first time.

You can't plan your character arc - you have a vague idea, maybe, but I'm constantly surprised. Sometimes actors in films will play the ending of the movie, or even the middle, and you know where it's going - as an audience member you can read the actor.

From an acting point of view you need to look at what you're bringing in.

I love making the backstory for myself. I think it's important. Every part I play, I work on the backstory. If it's fully written out in the script, or there are intimations of it in the script, fine. If not, fine, no problem. I'll fill it in, or I'll create what it is.

I walked around my apartment with food in my mouth asking myself: "How do I come up with this voice?" Then I found the voice. I called the director and said on the phone: "Guess who you're talking to Chris? Sid, that's right Sid!" And that's how I came up with the voice. That's a true story.

The notion that acting is simply about intuitively responding to situations the way you feel couldn't be farther away from how I ask actors to work.

That's one of my little expressions. I never really studied acting so I kind of kiddingly talk about "building your circle" and "mooding up," because I really didn't learn any technique.

Sometimes you know the story. Sometimes you make it up as you go along and have no idea how it will come out.

We get the scripts before the table read, but I don't look at them until we go into the table read. I don't want to know, when I'm playing a moment in the current episode, what's going to happen because it might change how I'm playing that.