Kelly Reilly Quotes

As an actress, I was trained to show emotion I did not feel, or no emotion at all.

You can't perish because of your own feelings; you have to embrace those things as an actor because it's part of your palette.

Actors are part of a certain percentage of people on this planet who have an emotional vocabulary as a primary experience. It's as if their life is experienced emotionally and then that is translated intellectually or conceptually into the performance.

I don't sit around with other actors and talk about the pain and the magic of acting.

I think actors always retain one foot in the cradle. We're switched on to our youth, to our childhood. We have to be because we're in the business of transferring emotions to other people.

When you start off acting, it does seem very romantic, and the make-believe part of it all seems very exciting. It's only later that you begin to realize how fascinating the work is - that it's a bottomless pit, and you never get to the end of it.

I went through this realization that acting, at its heart, is the ability to manipulate your own emotions.

It's funny because, if you're not an actor, people always tend to say, 'How do you memorize all those lines? Is that really hard?' I'm always like, 'That's just a small part of it. I have to seek my craft and my emotions' - you know, all this gross, actor-y stuff.

Bad actors try to cry, and good actors try not to. Bad actors try to laugh, and good actors try not to.

With acting, it's my job to be emotionally vulnerable and accessible.

Like any creative human being, I would like a bit more control so that it would be a little easier for me when the director says, 'One tear, right now,' that one tear would pop out.

It's not a pleasure torturing actors, although some of them enjoy it.

I have just gained a deeper and deeper respect for acting and the whole art of it because you're really trying to live a life and to do the best justification for it.

This acting's serious! And I really respect those actors. It's a tough business to be able to be something you're not and be natural and convince people on camera.

Acting is not being emotional, but being able to express emotion.

With film, it's all about the actor being able to feel the things that the character's feeling. It must do some strange things to your mind. Music I find much easier because you're being honest about where you are as a person.

I love to be a working actor, and I love to read scripts as they come in. If I find the script or character that is interesting, I want to transform myself into that character.

I've always remembered something Sanford Meisner, my acting teacher, told us. When you create a character, it's like making a chair, except instead of making someting out of wood, you make it out of yourself. That's the actor's craft - using yourself to create a character.

Like any other actor, I draw on life experience.

I don't cry. Well, you know, I think coming from an acting background that's really helped me because I more than anyone know that an actor creates a character.

Increasingly I've come to think that what's at the core of acting is thinking. Most people would say it's feeling.

I never thought of acting as a creative process. Christ, I used to go to the movies and see Brando talking like he was trying to sell shoes, and he was great. I thought anybody could do it. Then I tried it, and I got so uptight, I'm limited as to what I can do on film.

I've never so appreciated what actors do and how strange it is.

I think actors are brave souls that have to use parts of themselves that I'm just not comfortable doing anymore.

There's a fine line between the Method actor and the schizophrenic.