Damian Lewis Quotes

There is no first-hand account of what the Queen was saying or thinking, so my job as an actor is to interpret her circumstances.

The whole business of being an actor is to explore, from research to shooting to why you do it. You're trying to see why people do what they do and how it feels to do what they do.

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.

You have more creative freedom with writing, in certain ways, because you can create everything that happens. But, as an actor you also have creative freedom because you don't so much focus on what has to move the story along, and only on how your character is reacting to situations.

The thing I adore about acting is that it's not me: you get to experience all these emotions, but essentially it's not you.

The reason you want to act is to continue to explore every different part of the human psyche.

In playing the part of Mammy, I tried to make her a living, breathing character, the way she appeared to me in the book.

In the work that I normally do, you have a whole script, a whole arc, that you play. And I do believe a good actor will play every bit of information they're given.

If I'm doing my job as an actor, the audience knows everything I know about the character.

When you have a book as material as it is, it's a lot easier to create a character because you have so many resources to draw upon when acting.

If people need to be informed by lines, then there's no reason why the actor is saying the line except for information for the audience; I think there's something wrong.

Every role is challenging in its own way, but the most challenging roles are the ones that are badly written - then it's completely up to you to come up with something that is interesting to the story and myself as an actor.

I see my job as an actor to be as good a channel as I can be. Acting is a gift, and I have respect for it.

I believe that as a writer and a director, you're only providing the skeleton of a character, and you're hiring actors to fill it out.

Contrary to the popular misconception, the actor is not necessarily a specialist in imitating or portraying what he knows about other people. On the contrary, the actor may simply be a person who's more willing than others to reveal some truths about himself.

I'm a director's actor; I'm a storyteller's actor.

A lot of actors, whatever movie you're working on, you make up a back story just for your own, to work off, even if the audience doesn't have it revealed to them. I think it's important that the audience makes up their own mind.

I think that's just a natural instinct as an actor is that you want to just keep exploring humanity and finding different facets of it.

You try, as an actor, to wear a mask; you're serving a story.

For me, that is the craft of acting: literally creating something from nothing.

As an actor, when you want to capture the spirit of the character, and the character exists in all of the iterations slightly differently, you work towards getting a sense of what the creators wanted to do, you know? Then, you work off of that.

Whether you need to like a character, I don't think that's necessary in order to portray him.

My job as an actor is to just tell the story as best I can from my character's point of view and let the audience decide.

Good acting is confused with good dialogue delivery. Acting is about all about performance, and the way we interpret and understand the character that we bring alive onscreen.

The fundamental job of the actor is to tell about the human condition, to be a voice for the truest ideas and deepest emotions.