Shiri Appleby Quotes

I've worked with little kid actors before, and when they start crying or anything like that, it makes my job so easy, because you react. A little kid crying, there's not much else to do.

An actor definitely has to be in the past a well as the present; an actor must react to past experiences every minute, every second.

I think back story can help guide your choices, but when you're playing a scene, you're not making choices; you're just intuitive.

I took a psychology class, and I think the study of the mind can help me further my acting ability. It's also taught me about getting into an environment with new people and acting like you've known them forever.

Sometimes a scene works and acting is the easiest thing in the world and you don't have to do much of anything - just enjoy yourself and listen to the other actor. When it doesn't work, then every actor has different ways of dealing with the impasse. Sometimes you use memories from the past. Whatever. It depends from job to job.

Actors usually respond to minor aspects of their own character or things that even feel disparate from themselves.

I love acting it's apart of me and I try to put a little bit of myself in each of my roles.

I guess every actor has certain emotions they can access easier than others.

But I loved the script to 7th Heaven and couldn't say no. It made me laugh and cry, and I was hooked. I'd love to know who turned it down, because I'm sure at least one other actor did. But I'm glad he did, whoever it was.

I think it's always easier to play parts that you have something concrete that you can relate to.

When I do my job, I dive into these characters and try to flush something out of myself into these characters, and hopefully that translates well.

One of the things about acting is you can always use your life. You have to recall how you are and how people are and how you relate.

I know how to hit a mark without looking. I instinctively know where my eye line should be. That's all 100%. But your character and the story are always different, so the emotional part is not muscle memory. You're still surprised by stuff and get the adrenaline.

When I got the part, I tried to remember Batman as I knew him when I was a kid - with emotional recall.

I'm a big believer in sort of sense memory, like using something that you've experienced in order to put yourself in the position that the character is in.

When you see bad acting, that's usually what it is - they're not listening to the other characters. It's always hard with first-time actors to get them in that moment where they are really listening to the other characters and reacting to the other characters.

I remember watching that scene in 'My Girl' where Anna Chlumsky cries at a funeral. I would cry with her and be like, 'Yeah, I think I could do that. I could do a funeral scene.'

None of the characters I played was very close to me as a real person.

I think, as an actor, you create things for your character that you think will make it more personal to you, because on the day, you want to make sure that you're truly there in the moment.

I just don't play a character for the heck of it. Rather, I always look for a human element in every character that I play.

I honestly do think that every character - you pick up the things, little things that you like about them in your life. Especially if you play a character for a long time.

The notion that acting is simply about intuitively responding to situations the way you feel couldn't be farther away from how I ask actors to work.

As an actor, you use the things from yourself that you can apply to the character.

I think people pick up on that. You use personal stuff and mix it all in - I definitely pull on that stuff in my acting.

To me, acting is a matter of absolute concentration. You can laugh and giggle with your friends up to the minute the director says, "Action!" Then you snap your mind into shape and into the character that you're playing and relate to the people that you're acting with and forget everybody else that you've been joking with.