Gabriel Mann Quotes

As an actor, it's more interesting to play a nerd than anything else. It's a lot more fun - you don't worry about 'what's my hair like?' in the morning or 'which is my great angle?'

To portray an iconic character has been brilliant in itself, and to be able to do that on a show like 'Once Upon a Time' enhances that because the show puts a spin on characters and makes them very different and puts core values that are very different that aren't in the original fairy tales a lot of people relate to.

To me, there are things you're good at and things you're not so good at. For some reason, I'm good at darker characters. It has to do with how you look.

I was unusual looking - I didn't have the look of that time. If you look at 'Lucas' - and, basically, my first five or six movies - the characters are not described in the scripts as attractive people.

I enjoy playing Mr. Darcy, but I'm not hungry to play Mark Darcy again.

I find the voice is what I look for first and foremost with just about every character I play.

It's fashionable for modern actors to talk about getting 'inside' a character. But you can't get to the inside without getting the outside right first.

It was a great circumstance when I received the script of [Chloe] and Atom [Egoyan] said he wanted me to do it. I was inclined to say 'yes' immediately.

Many people are laughing when they see me, but I'm playing Mrs.Baskets all pristine. I'm playing it not-Louie. I'm not being Louie. I'm just being the character that I think it should be. I had to make a decision as to whether I was going to change my voice or not, but we decided for me not to change my voice, and I think that was the best thing ever, because I think it would've made a big difference in the character. I don't think it would've been as good.

I don't intentionally try to find the scripts with unattractive characters, but I think that if a character is described in a script as heart-stoppingly beautiful, and there's nothing else said about her, it just doesn't hold a lot of interest for me.

Others form man; I tell of him, and portray a particular one, very ill-formed, whom I should really make very different from whathe is if I had to fashion him over again. But now it is done.

It's a tricky one when you're playing somebody who is mad. There's often the big actor's question, if you're playing a part like that: do you take it to be an internalized thing, pull the audience in, or do you go full-out, and kind of present it as quite a shocking thing?

Taking on an iconic character is difficult, sure, people associate different actors with a character that you're playing, but there's something in rehearsing and developing a new character.

When somebody is talking to you about something terrible on set with lines, and you believe what he says, sometimes it gives a strange vibe, because you wonder when that person is talking if he's talking about something that really happened to him and he's using the character.

It becomes more and more popular to call actors who play characters "character actors." But I've always been somebody who is much more invested in who I am playing than how they look.

In the comics, Supergirl is quite, um, buxom...so I hope people won't come to the film expecting that.

I worked so hard on that role [of Debra in Dexter]. And I barely worked on Rita. But I read for casting - both parts - and they said, "That's great, we're going to bring you in for producers." So I read for some producers - both parts - and they said, "That's great, we're going to bring you in to meet the creator." And I went in, and as soon as I walked in the room, he looked at me and he said, "Oh my god, you're our Rita!" And I said, "No! I'm Deb! I'm a total Deb!" "No, you're Rita!".

As actors we're supposed to be our character's advocate.

We actors can't say every line as if it has weight, but what we want to do is be true to the meaning of each line, whatever it is. Even the lines that are throwaway may come back later.

Regardless of how dark and heavy the character is the actor has to approach it with that frame of mind.

If you want to do your version, go off and write it. You bring your knowledge to it, and you can use that to shape it and color it, but it's someone else's version of that character. You're not actually playing the real person.

The danger of course is always is caricature. The biggest challenge was to sound like Nelson Mandela. Everything else is easy to do, walk like him. He has a few ticks and things I noticed that I picked up. I didn't have any agenda, as it were, in playing the role other than to bring it as close to reality as I possibly could.

...my least favorite actress of all time, Helena Bonham Carter. I find her lack of a neck very off-putting and especially her acting.

With voice acting, it liberates you to play characters you'd never do in a million years because you're physically not right. You can show up looking like hell, you don't have to memorize your lines because you can read them right off the page, and you get to play the most fun parts. You come in and you kick everyone's ass and you get your own ass kicked, and then you go home.

I owe a great deal to Revenge Of The Nerds movie and I loved making it. But I've said this a lot: My character is as far from me as it's possible to be. People feel like they know who he is, and when they see me they just assume that I'm going to be like that guy. For me, to be that kind of anti-social misfit was something that I found to be a real challenge.