Acting Believability Quotes

I remember watching Cate Blanchett in 'Elizabeth' and feeling like for the first time - even though that time period wasn't happening now - that I believed that role.

When I was younger, I played a lot of upper-class English girls. Then I came to America, and everyone was like, 'She's very believable as trailer trash.'

I don't want to sound hoity-toity, but people told me I should watch 'Cheers' because it's very funny. So I watched it, and I just went, 'This is the great show of the universe?' To me, acting is making characters believable, not just doing jokes.

One would expect an actress to stand onscreen mostly as a caricature. If she would say, "I'm selling shoes," you would believe her. She says it and it creates this fiction, non-fiction perception of the film. People believe it because she says it. If she said, "I'm a butcher," people would believe it too, I think.

Whenever you have a character in which one of his defining qualities is his sexuality, it's always challenging, because you don't want to bring in someone who's going to play that in a phony way.

What do actors really want? To be great actors? Yes, but you can't buy talent, so it's best to leave the word 'great' out of it. I think to be believed, onstage or onscreen, is the one hope that all actors share.

I do keep getting these bad girl roles. The funny thing is that, honestly, I don't think I'm believable as these aristocratic mean girls. But I do love playing them.

When you're portraying someone, whether they're real or fictional, you have to find some kind of hook where it feels real to you because if you don't believe it yourself, then no one else is going to believe it.

When I play a gay character, I want to be as believable as possible. And when I'm playing a straight character, I also want to be as believable as possible. So the less that people know about my personal life, the more believable I can be as a character.

When I'm watching somebody act, it's a behavior editorial function - I look at someone act, and I might say, 'I don't believe him when he says that.' I don't know why I don't believe him, probably because the people that I've met, they don't act like that when they say stuff like that and mean it.

It's weird that you have to work really, really hard just to be real or normal. Everybody's got their different techniques, but what makes a really good actor is somebody who's really believable.

I feel like I express myself, as an actor. Whatever the character is put in front of me, I try to bring truth to it, whichever way it lands. I try to bring as much truth to it and make it as believable as I can. I think that's the job of an actor.