Jurnee Smollett Quotes

Don't forget there are two sides to performing. Finding the truth, but you also have to be transparent enough for the audience to see it. How many times have you seen a performance and thought: 'Well, it seems to be meaning a great deal to you but it ain't coming across to me?' It is to be shared.

As an actor, every opportunity, every role, everything that I do is an opportunity to have someone have a human experience with my work. I don't just want it to be about a cute wardrobe and a high paycheck.

I put a lot of time and energy and thought behind what I do and the characters that I create, and I don't want to do anything peripheral that is going to make an audience see me up there on the screen rather than who I'm playing.

I look at scripts really for whether they can be moving or penetrate some kind of truth. You are constantly chasing that feeling as an actor when every part of a production comes together.

I hate acting when I see it. I don't want to feel it, I don't want to see it, I want to be taken away with the story - I don't want the actor's ego in front of me. That's what I try to live when I do the work.

I feel like my responsibility as an actor is to make characters as compelling and believable as possible.

I believe that acting in any medium is the same thing, it's discovering the truth in where you are.

I think a director can make a play happen before your eyes so that you are part of it and it is part of you. If you can get it right, there's no mystery. It's not about mystery. It's not even mysterious. It's about our lives.

Listen, acting is not surgery, it's entertainment. You're doing something to hopefully move people, to make them laugh, to transport them. But actors are vulnerable, and the reason we're vulnerable is that we're always trying to recreate human behaviour.

I like making people feel things. Acting doesn't seem like lying but like storytelling.

Be it 120 frames or 24 frames or film or theatre, you're trying to be a fully formed human being and trying to be honest.

Even great actors who transform who they are still go to a really honest place; I think that's sort of that special skill that actors have.

Real acting is about giving people an insight into a person, letting the audience in.

As an actress, my ultimate goal is to create a universal experience in my acting.

At the end of the day, you're trying to - be it on theatre or on the camera - tell the truth and be honest in the moment.

I can disappear into things very easily. But with acting, you have to be in the moment, and it gives me this incredibly fulfilling emotion: being really present.

Fiction, at its best, is a radical act of intimacy. It seeks to join, to merge, to know deeply; and, as with intimacy, there is a way in which it cannot be faked.

I always thought that if you don't feel the breath in the actors' bodies, you lose all the intimacy and truth.

I think that talking about the personal specificity, personal details, is how you get the big, big audiences - by talking about your relationships or your personal tragedies. If you reach out with that energy, you'll touch people.

As an actor, you always want to feel like what you're doing is making a difference to the story.

Being an actor in movies is a lot about the power of your imagination and making the circumstance real to you so the audience will feel that it's real.

Feelings are universal, and if an actor's doing his job, I think he's making people sit there, and if it's in a movie or a theatre, going 'Hmm, yeah, I know that... I know that.'

I'd play the same character for ten years if the words and the moments that I'm playing are authentic.

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.

Great actors try to dismiss all ideas from their conscious mind in order to provide an experience that is real.