David Hyde Pierce Quotes

I wake up and play a different person every day. Playing all these different characters and trying to figure out who your true authentic self is at the core of that as you're playing all these different roles, and man, that self-awareness starts to come into effect. And you start to see who you really are.

When I take a role I wonder how I can use it to find out who I really am. I don't think I'm so rare a person.

I think the beautiful thing about acting is you don't really know who you are. You're able to be whatever you want any day during the week.

It's so funny, you go to acting school thinking you're going to learn how to be other people, but really it taught me how to be myself. Because it's in understanding yourself deeply that you can lend yourself to another person's circumstances and another person's experience.

You can spend a bit of yourself when you give yourself to a character. At the end of a job, you have to remind yourself who and what you are.

Like, that was weird in 'Hamlet 2,' because I played myself there, fully myself, but then I realized, 'Oh, I'm not playing myself. I'm some weird version of myself.' So as an actress, you're always playing something, I don't even know who I am, how could I become me? I don't know what that is.

The reason I feel like I act is because you get to live a million different lives in one. I don't have to go about my life, just being easy-going New Zealander Rose. Sometimes I can inhabit a feisty, vicious character. Sometimes I can inhabit a painfully shy British girl, or whatever it might be.

I choose roles that are not me.

At least when you're acting you can be someone. In front of the camera you have to be yourself. And who am I?

I've done teaching and things like that because if you're acting, you're becoming other human beings, and you need to have time to find who you are as well.

We are not what we seem. We are more than what we seem. The actor knows that. And because the actor knows that hidden inside himself there's a wizard and a king, he also knows that when he's playing himself in his daily life, he's playing a part, he's performing, just as he's performing when he plays a part on stage.

As long as I can wear a wig I can be any character, and in real life I can be myself.

There's something safe about playing a character, but then it's like, 'Who am I underneath it all?'

I'm now learning how to distinguish when I'm acting and when I'm not acting - offstage as well as onstage.

Actors use who they are to be someone else, but I would hate to ever think I'm playing myself. It's imagining being someone else that is the key motivating thing for me. So when people want to know about me, it makes me a bit unnerved.

What acting offered me was the chance to be many other people.

It's interesting, the acting thing. I think it must be a deep sense of insecurity that made me want to explore other characters.

Acting made me realise this is me; this is what I always wanted to be. Even today, I am an awkward kid, and I feel most comfortable when I become a character before the camera.

As I say, there's something that scares the hell out of me but it really makes me work hard in losing myself. I'm not really interested in me as an actor or being a personality player, or a Hollywood star. What's given to me is to become different people and to find the truth of that. That is really what I do.

You've got to play what people think you are, rather than what you are. You have to have a sense of what you are as you're playing what people think you are.

I like René Descartes' theory about a ball of wax. You can change its form from solid to liquid, but it's still the same ball of wax. With acting, you are the same person in a different form. You can only be what you know, and you only truly know yourself.

It’s always about, somehow, finding a part of myself that is relevant, and then turning the volume up on that particular part. So, I am all of the characters I've ever played, and I am none of them at the same time.

I think I'm always drawn to projects that help me understand something about myself.

For almost every character I've played in the 43 years I've been working as a professional actor, I've found parts of myself. We are all bipolar in the tiniest essence of what it is. We are all multiple personalities, in a sense, and to be healthy mentally, I think, learning what those multiple personalities are and inviting them in your life is really important.

I think all characters that we play are facets of ourselves.