Dramatic Nuance Quotes

As an actor, you always want to do the juicy stuff. But, it's important to get the levels right.

It's easier to play aggression and malevolence onscreen, often, than to hit softer notes.

In a very complex way, things have improved in the dramatic field. Before you had the good and the bad and you couldn't mingle them. Now it's more ambiguous.

Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you-trippingly on the tongue; but if you mouth it, as many of your players do, I had as lief the town-crier spoke my lines. Nor do not saw the air too much with your hand, thus, but use all gently; for in the very torrent, tempest, and as I may say, the whirlwind of your passion, you must acquire and beget a temperance that may give it smoothness.

When you're playing King Lear, you have to have a little humour, or you will have no tragedy when the king dies.

'Vikings' has been so many different challenges, and some of that is, at times, you have to be big and imposing and violent and vicious, and then you have be pulled back and withdrawn and just more layers and more time to portray those layers, too.

For me, my storyline [in Big Little Lies] is very complicated and nuanced. [The script] was so beautifully written. It was very, very easy to play. ... I think one of the scenes is almost eight minutes.

My job as an actor is to cover and expose in varying allowance that - so that the audience can peek through the window to the people I create.

One of the things you hope you've done as a playwright is create roles that can sustain different interpretations.

A director must push his actors to the utmost limit to get everything possible out of each scene - without being corny or sentimental or going overboard.

Wrestling has to be more aggressive. It has to be bigger; it has to translate to the back of a football stadium. With acting, when that camera is up close, they can see your nose hairs twitch, and you have to pull back everything for it not to look clownish. There is that different mindset.

Sometimes the better the writing, the harder it is to play because you really want to service it.

It is very easy to play a sweet girl-next-door but difficult to portray a grey character.

Sometimes what happens is that, when you micromanage actors and moments, it just doesn't quite live.