As an actor, you use the things from yourself that you can apply to the character.
Acting is a very personal process. It has to do with expressing your own personality, and discovering the character you're playing through your own experience - so we're all different.
I'm always happier and a better actor when I can really lose myself in a character and become somebody else.
My strength lies in prepping. I'm not someone who can just walk onto the set and perform.
What I really mean is that actors do the interview process because they have to. It's a good bargain: If I can do this part then I'll sell it. I just wish it wasn't me who had to do it because it feels very unnatural.
As an actor, you can't just imitate someone. You have to get under her skin.
There is such a thing as my kind of actor, and how well they pull off my dialogue is a very, very important part of it.
When I was a younger actor, I would try to keep it serious all day. But I have found, later on, that the lighter I am about things when I'm going to do a big scene that's dramatic and takes a lot out of you, the better off I am when I come to it.
I think when you're acting, you usually don't have to know too much beyond how to pronounce the words you're saying.
There are some similarities, I think, with all the characters I play. I'm not a guy who sees the desire to transform with each part; I'm not a piece of clay.
When I work in a film like an actor, I do not interfere or try to use my seniority or impose anything on the filmmaker.
I lived in Hollywood and, ironically, I didn't know you could just go out and get an agent and go on auditions and try and become an actor, I thought it was like a Masonic thing, like a blood line you had to belong to – until I was 13. Then I realised what you had to do. It is the one thing I know I want to do for the rest of my life.
I'm not a method actor per se, but if I'm playing a character that, at its core of its persona, has experiences I don't have, I try to search out and get firsthand experiences of similar sorts so I have something to fantasize about.
There is mental as well as physical fatigue. You have to cry, scream, keep on repeating the same dialogue till you get it right.
With most good scripts and good shows, they expect the actor to bring some of their ideas to the backstory of the character. It's always a good collaboration between the actor and the writer and the director to try stuff out during the process.
I don't know how to play myself. I'm not interested enough in myself. That's just not how I was educated. That's not how I learned to become an actor. Acting is creating a character.
Even when I'm reading a script where I'm supposed to be looking at the lead role, I'll find myself gravitating toward some small weirdo in a few scenes instead. I'm very instinctive like that and I love the challenge of not having a lot of time to create someone who feels real.
When I research a role it does get a little crazy and maybe even a little stupid.
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.
I have no idea what 'method actor' means.
I am a professional actor, and I don't go about moralizing about what the character does. Otherwise, seriously, why be an actor? You're not making some kind of social statement. That's not what actors do.
I believe in the fact that to portray a character convincingly, you need to live that character, own that character. You have to be earnest with every line that you deliver. However, it doesn't mean that you have to cut off your true self.
Any good actor is a character actor.
When you get a character that you're just starting to work on, it's the most exciting and most terrifying feeling because you have endless hours of diving in, researching, reading, and decision-making.
The whole business of being an actor is to explore, from research to shooting to why you do it. You're trying to see why people do what they do and how it feels to do what they do.
