Roger Rees Quotes

You can watch someone on-stage cry and cry - but in the audience you feel nothing. It's easy to become indulgent. For me, what's important is the story first.

Theater has to resonate in your heart in a way that movies don't.

Once in awhile, there's stuff that makes me say, That's what theatre's about. It has to be a human event on the stage, and that doesn't happen very often.

You experience the films through the actors, so they're all locked into your imagination in some kind of layer of fantasy or hatred or wherever they settle into your imagination.

I love doing theater so much - being in front of an audience and seeing how a character grows and develops with every performance.

With acting, I started very young, and I'd performed for a lot of children in boarding schools, late at night after the dormitory lights were out. I'd have a flashlight, and I'd be Count Dracula, or Shakespeare, or Yogi Bear, and leap from bunk to bunk. I loved the laughter; I liked the way it made people feel.

And that's what people want to see when they go to the theater. I believe at the end of the day, they want to see themselves - parts of their lives they can recognize. And I feel if I can achieve that, it's pretty spectacular.

Feelings are universal, and if an actor's doing his job, I think he's making people sit there, and if it's in a movie or a theatre, going 'Hmm, yeah, I know that... I know that.'

The reason I'm an actor and am trying to make my way in drama is to move people, to affect people, to gain a response - so these people who come up to you in the street are your audience.

Acting is an imaginative leap, really, isn't it? And imaginations prosper in different circumstances.

When you act, you've got to be like a poet or a musician. It's not about evidence before court. It's not a forensic subject. It's poetry; it's a completely different place.

Live theater is just an incredibly powerful medium, and I think anyone who goes, whether they know about it or not, if they see something that sort of fits with them, it's kind of hard to deny that they had a good time.

I don't like the idea the viewer can kind of sit there and go, 'Make me like this person.' People aren't inherently sympathetic.

If you can have heart as well as the comedy, it takes you a lot further. I think that that's what we were trying to do with 'Gigi.'

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.

All the modern verse plays, they're terrible; they're mostly about the poetry. It's more important that the play is first.

I've never been passionate about just music, I've never seen myself going into music in that sense. My love for music has always been connected to the stories told through music, which is why I was drawn to theater and why I think 'Glee' is so powerful.

It's like fiction - the fact that somebody's telling you a story about people who didn't exist doesn't make the experience of the story any less real in your heart and mind. You go through heavy emotional responses to these stories, and wrestling is a similar thing - but it's happening in real space.

I think a director can make a play happen before your eyes so that you are part of it and it is part of you. If you can get it right, there's no mystery. It's not about mystery. It's not even mysterious. It's about our lives.

Acting is a nice childish profession - pretending you're someone else and, at the same time, selling yourself.

Don't forget there are two sides to performing. Finding the truth, but you also have to be transparent enough for the audience to see it. How many times have you seen a performance and thought: 'Well, it seems to be meaning a great deal to you but it ain't coming across to me?' It is to be shared.

Theatre is, occasionally, capable of moments of truth.

Theater is great because you're able to tell a narrative arc without a break. I think it's more about the material and whether what we get offered is good.

Theater is such its own living, breathing animal. You do a show every night, but it's different every night. Being on stage, you're experiencing a journey.

Our job is to unleash the play. It's not just about your character or interaction with the other characters. There's an energy in all good plays which you have to find. And that is part and parcel of ensuring that an audience gets what it's about.