Performance Realism Quotes

Theater is such a different ballgame than film. And that's really why I stayed in film, because I really love the reality of connecting with your own feelings, and really putting that across in a realistic way. In film, the smallest muscular movements in your face, that are produced just by sheer feelings, you're not controlling them in anyway, can be seen by people in the audience because your face is sometimes, frighteningly, 40 feet wide!

It makes it fun. When an actor plays a character, you want what that character wants. Otherwise it doesn't look authentic. So I really want to defeat Jimmy - I mean Jimmy as the character.

With comedy, don't try to be funny. That's really helped me. Just say the lines as you would say them, interact with other characters, and try to make it as real as possible. It will come out funny.

You put on a face for the public. The face isn't false; it's just another side of you. If it were false, you couldn't last. People want something real and natural, and if they catch you acting, you're dead. It has to look real. In order to look real, it has to be real, and I've always thought of the characters I've played as real people.

If you're going to play a brain surgeon, you just have to learn how to say the words. You don't have to go and learn how to cut open somebody's scalp. I think acting is acting. Being is something else.

I try to do as many of my own stunts as possible. If you keep on taking yourself out of the role you play, you lose the thread of the character.

Acting is not acting. It isn't putting on a face and dancing around in a mask. It's believing that you are that character and playing him as if it were a normal day in the life of that character.

I don't have an 'actor cry.'

I want people to look like people when they're dancing.

The danger of course is always is caricature. The biggest challenge was to sound like Nelson Mandela. Everything else is easy to do, walk like him. He has a few ticks and things I noticed that I picked up. I didn't have any agenda, as it were, in playing the role other than to bring it as close to reality as I possibly could.

You can't have the real thing on camera - that's the nature of cinema. When you see people like Daniel Day-Lewis and Ralph Fiennes screaming and hyperventilating, you're seeing the phoniest kind of bad acting. You may as well have a 'men at work' sign. It's not acting if you can see it.

People pay far too much attention to the television and they're quite literal in some ways. At the beginning, when I was playing very stupid characters, I think people genuinely thought I was possibly quite dim-witted myself, which is a compliment in some ways, as I must have been doing my job very well.

I try not to do scenes a certain way, because then I become conscious of it, and it dosen't come off as realistic. I try to make it so that I'm not really aware of what I'm doing.

Actors are steeped in a world of agents and where the next job is coming from and what are their expenses and what is the hotel like. You want to take them out of that world and dump them into another world, so that when you meet them on the screen they don't seem like the guy who was in two others movies that year.

Playing someone supernatural is more realistic than I thought it would be.

The problem was to sustain at any cost the feeling you had in the theater that you were watching a real person, yes, but an intense condensation of his experience, not simply a realistic series of episodes.

I know there are a lot of people who like to get very involved in their characters, but I, personally, find it too involved. I just like to do it as a job - and it's my job to make it look real.

I've never been very comfortable as an actor looking out into the audience; I always like to keep my focus on the other person. When you start playing out to the audience, it takes me out of it, because people don't do that when you're in life behaving with another person - you don't often look out, around you, in a presentational manner.

For my money, when you're doing an on-camera performance, unless it's for something particularly stylised, you are, by and large, striving for naturalism.

If you put lots of auto-tune on your voice on the album, people are going to be disappointed when they come to see you live. The imperfections make it better, more natural.

In a theater you can fool everyone past the tenth row if you're good, but on the screen you can't really fool anyone for a second.

If you're trying to make someone happy, you gotta try and make them happy. If you're trying to have a normal conversation, you've got to have a normal conversation. If you're trying to make them sad, you've got to make them sad. I think that's how you get real performances out of people.

I need to make the characters that I play in movies more accessible to audiences, more real. As an actor, you're always passive; you're not making that many choices, so when something allows you to open up a bit, you want to explore your newfound freedom.

It's very important to be able to distinguish the actors from the characters they play.

The one thing I never want to do is act drunk or act high. You don’t do it from a mental kind of place because then you’re just acting.