Henry Ian Cusick Quotes

As an actor, I've grown considerably. It's taken me years to get comfortable doing a romantic scene and dancing on stage in front of a live audience. I've really opened up a lot.

I don't think I would be a good actor! People enjoyed 'Dancing With the Stars' because I was myself, and every time they told me to say something, I would say my own words, so I don't think I could follow a script well!

Because I trained in theater, I always leave a film shoot feeling like I haven't done anything, like I just sat in front of the camera and whispered, essentially.

I'm not a natural-born actor. So it's been a very slow learning curve for me.

I think I'm not a natural performer; I think I'm an actor.

Something I learned as an actor was which scenes needed to be rehearsed and which actors are good with rehearsal, which actors learn from it, and which ones grow stale because they start to second-guess themselves.

It takes me some time to get into what I am doing - since I am not a trained actor, I don't have that skill. I have to think of what I am doing and how it comes through.

I think for an upcoming actress the biggest challenge is that sometimes there are situations when she has no luxury for rehearsals.

When you work as an actor, you've got to feel safe even in what appears to be the simplest things.

Having done a lot of theater, I'm used to sustaining characters over long periods of time.

Thankfully, I have a background as an actor, and you learn how to live in that world of not knowing what's going to happen next.

I think if you're an actor, then you can work on stage - but if you've never done it before, you're going to have picked up a few things that you're going to need to change when you're working on stage.

I've always been fairly confident in my acting.

I like to remind myself how hard acting is. I do parts in friends' stuff.

Soaps are the best. They really are. If you can do a soap, well, you can do anything. You have to learn pages of dialogue very quickly.

I feel like my early experiences of acting, and I think a lot of other actors' too, are probably at camp or school plays where you get to have great range. At camp, I remember getting to play a 50-year-old man.

I found acting tough; it takes a lot out of you if you have no technique.

People think memorizing lines is hard, when that's the last thing you worry about. You get that done, and then you've got to worry about the internal stuff, which is the challenging part.

To start, I wasn't really interested in acting at all, and I didn't make much impact. The first play I was in was on for five nights and I didn't show up for two of them and nobody noticed. But I stayed because that's where my friends were, and after a while I found myself wanting to inhabit other people's worlds and lives.

I suddenly think the job of acting is a difficult one. It's not as flip, irrelevant and shallow a calling as I thought it was in the Eighties.

Acting can truly take a toll on your nerves. I mean, we have to be larger than life. Worse, I've seen actors acting off the sets, too.

For me, there's nothing more valuable as an actor, or better way to learn, than getting to perform in front of a live audience, no matter where you are. Whether it's on Broadway, in Florida, or doing a tour.

I'm a lazy actor, lazier than you would think. I don't usually do a lot of research.

In the beginning, it was quite challenging because I had zero acting experience, and delivering dialogues was the most difficult thing for me to do. But after I began to act, I grew as an artiste.

I had always heard that theatre is for 'serious' actors but after actually having rehearsed day in and day out, I realize how challenging it is.