Sam Levinson Quotes

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

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

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

In acting, you draw so much on your private life.

Trying to be a good actor has to be involved with placing yourself imaginatively in different people's circumstances.

The actor's job is to put themselves in the shoes of the character they are trying to portray as truthfully as possible.

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 actors, we have to take characters, and we have to feel for them and ultimately become them, and share that on screen so that audience feels that.

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

I just love to act. I like to get away, totally play a different character, someone you can get really involved in knowing. I've gotten really involved in some characters and written down little summaries of where they live and what their families are like.

Sometimes I think of movie acting as advanced pretend.

With any role, you're extending yourself and acting out things that never happened to you.

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.

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.

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

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.

I take my time to get into the mindset of the character and say my lines. I really have to be the person that I am playing.

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.

I distinctly remember watching Daniel Day Lewis in 'My Left Foot,' and my parents were discussing the fact that he's an actor. To me, it was a foreign concept. I was like, 'Someone is pretending to do that? That's so awesome!' After that, it just stayed in the back of my mind.

In day-to-day life, our brain sends lots of signals. In acting, there are no signals. You have to believe in what you are trying to portray.

As actors, you play people who are not yourselves!

Sometimes you can just step into the character, and you get all your feelings and emotions just from sympathizing with her and being her. But then, other times, you just have to resort back to anything that you've been through in your own life and try to play that.

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.