Evan Peters Quotes

We get the scripts before the table read, but I don't look at them until we go into the table read. I don't want to know, when I'm playing a moment in the current episode, what's going to happen because it might change how I'm playing that.

One of the things you learn at drama school is not to play the result, but just to play the moment.

Now there are certain things you have to prepare - like dialect and special skills. But in the moment, interaction between two characters on the page doesn't need - for me, I don't need to prepare that.

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.

With acting, you wanna see if you can get into trouble without knowing how you're gonna get out of it. It's like the exact opposite of war, where you need an exit strategy. When you're acting, you should get all the way into trouble with no exit strategy, and have the cameras rolling.

There are two schools of thought: There are those actors who explain to you that they know exactly how they're going to do the part... And then there is the other method, which is to have no method at all. This is mine.

What's interesting about the process of acting is how often you don't know what you're doing.

If the script's good, everything you need is in there. I just try and feel it, and do it honestly. I also don't learn things for auditions, because I feel like it's just a test of memorizing rather than being real. Maybe every other actor would think that was terrible, I don't know. But it seems to have worked for me, so far.

I don't really prepare for each role the same way.

It's kind of up to the actor to deconstruct the scene and deconstruct the character and figure out how to make it real. That's what I love about this job: It's sort of a puzzle each time, and figuring that out is sort the key, whether I'm playing a cop or a killer.

I don't usually like talking about acting or what my process is, and all those kinds of things, because I don't necessarily think it's helpful to talk about how I do my job.

For me, acting is a series of impressions rather than trying to find one line through to the end, which risks becoming more of a presentation.

I think acting really helps as a director. It's just no question, because you totally understand the acting process.

I had acting teachers, and one of the things that was encouraged was to keep it fresh, to be spontaneous. That's the magic of film often.

The great thing about being an actor is things happen to you very quickly. I like to put myself in the way of surprise.

Good actors, especially when they know their character, will come in and either tell you in advance that they have an idea, or in the middle of the rehearsal or the scene they'll let it loose and you go, 'Ah that's great.'

It is hard to be an actor on a TV show, because you don't know what's coming and you sort of find out very last minute sort of what's happening.

In every film, whether it's a fictional character or not, you create an idea of the character and for me I always do a bad impersonation to start with.

All actors bring something unexpected to the role because they have to translate what's on the page and make a real character out of the black-and-white text that's there in the script.

I don't concern myself with thinking ahead to the finished product. I focus more specifically on what the character is experiencing. Once you relieve yourself of the very arbitrary and always punishing pressure of what an audience is expecting you to do, acting becomes a lot more fun and pure.

Sometimes you do complete run-throughs of scenes, sometimes you break scenes down into little bits. It just depends on what the actors like to do. It's almost like jamming.

Since I was from the theater, that's how I learned how to go through the process of being a character. That's how I learned, and that's what I was comfortable doing. And then, the first feature films, I'm sure I was no fun because I did not want to be spontaneous in that filmic way that really can work for you.

I don't know if I do anything to get into character: I just go with my gut.

I don't do rehearsal. Some directors prefer to do rehearsal - readings before the actual shooting - but I don't like this process because I think there are certain things that are so spontaneous, and they cannot happen twice.

Sometimes, actors in films will play the ending of the movie, or even the middle, and you know where it's going - as an audience member, you can read the actor.