Tom Berenger Quotes

Like De Niro. He's one of the best character actors we have ever had.

On the stage you develop a character that's different from yourself. In a film they're always saying, 'Walk over here. Say this line. Be you.'

There's this whole list of old personalities that I can act, as corny as that sounds, or as method actor as that sounds.

Robert DeNiro, who may be the greatest living actor, usually acts in a way which is very stone-faced, like Steve McQueen.

I love acting, and ultimately all my characters are very different, and each character I love in a different way.

Actors love mental disorders, dialects, and corsets. Give them one of the three and they're happy.

I usually can find a way to do a character to make it real and work. But sometimes it's a struggle sustaining that, because there's such a level of personal involvement and personal, physical, and emotional distraughtness.

There are maybe 100 actors I look up to, but my first two favourite actors were Dustin Hoffman and Jack Nicholson.

The ability to stretch my range into all genres and characters is something I take great pleasure in doing. I thoroughly enjoy it. I consider myself a character actor, though some think of me as a leading man. As an actor, I love shifting gears from character to character, and the more range I can expand, the better.

For me, personality acting is not that interesting. I don't want to just be myself.

When you are developing a character you have to bring so much of yourself to the role.

In my career, there have been three things that were challenging: playing gay; playing a Jewish woman; and playing Chekhov. The scariest part was playing Chekhov!

I can inhabit any character in a way that is difficult to do successfully in a contemporary novel.

Sometimes you can just step into the character, and you get all your feelings and emotions just from sympathizing with her and being her. But then, other times, you just have to resort back to anything that you've been through in your own life and try to play that.

One role blends into the next role. I mean, there's strange idiosyncrasies from roles that I play that I picked up that will never go away.

What I find most interesting about acting is transforming myself.

Being an actor is a lot more involved than many people realize; there are hundreds of ways to play any character. Even for a stylized bad guy, there are 4 or 5 different personalities I can play off the top of my head without thinking - better and more experienced actors can do dozens or hundreds.

I am the kind of actor who will do just about anything.

'Whatever it takes' is my opinion of method acting and, indeed, any other kind of acting. Look at Brando and De Niro. But it's not my cup of tea.

The fun is getting to wear multiple disguises and getting to explore multiple personalities and bring them to life. So a movie career definitely affords me that.

There's different ways of getting into character. There's what's called 'the outside,' in which is finding the physicality of the character first. To give an example, in 'Gettin' Square' - Johnny Spitieri - that's how I found that character. I knew those people that I'd seen up at Kings Cross. I knew how they sounded.

As an actor, I tend to enjoy going to the dark side.

That's what acting is about - for me, at least - tackling different personas and characters.

I've heard of actors like De Niro and Streep who stay in character all day long. And Daniel Day-Lewis did it for 'My Left Foot.' I don't do that myself.

I can play the character better because of the roundness of my experience - because of the things I've been through. All those method guys - like that De Niro, Stallone, and what's his name, Pacino - they're all the same.