Role Internalization Quotes

When you're a child, and you're growing up, and you're mimicking a certain character, or you're trying to live and breathe a certain character on set for eight years that are also your formative years, you oftentimes take a lot of who you're playing into your real life and kind of become that thing.

It's very strange to become a character: the lines get blurred, and you start to sort of, I don't know, take it home too much?

Rehearsing a scene beds a role into you. But sometimes, if you over-rehearse it without unearthing any new meaning in it, you can suddenly forget your lines. You realise that you are on a stage, not in the real world. The scene's emotional power, and your immersion in it, disappears.

By the end, you should be inside your character, actually operating from within somebody else, and knowing him pretty well, as that person knows himself or herself. You're sort of a predator, an invader of people.

If someone puts a character in front of me - no matter what it is, whether there has been a film or not - I want to be that character, not imitate it. There's a difference - a big difference.

Once, during an interview in front of my wife, I was asked, "Are you one of those actors who brings your character home? Do you stay in character?" I said, "No, not really. I don't do that," and she started laughing. I asked her why. She said, "Well, you might think you don't bring characters home, but you do." So, while I don't feel like a character is lingering, it probably is.

I try to do my best to differentiate each fella, each spirit, from the next one... and once it's exorcised it doesn't just go away. It becomes a part of you. So every role becomes a part of you.

Even when you think you can detach yourself from the characters, you don't. Because you're spending so much time trying to realize this person and make them real that they do infect you, in a way. And you do take them home and live with them, even if you think you're turning the character off. But in order to pull off a role convincingly, you wind up thinking about that person all the time, and it does sort of creep into you. And then there are things that you'll respond to, or react to in a very different way than you would normally.

Any time you play a character for a long period of time, regardless of how close it is to you, it infiltrates your life. It's impossible for it not to.

You don't realize how much a part of your character is part of yourself until you are no longer playing that character.

The character I played on 'Everwood' was so serious and melancholic that after doing it for four years, it really started affecting my soul. I was becoming Ephram.

Sometimes you even start to sound like the character because you're living and breathing them every day on the set. It gets into your bones.

It's weird, not to sound too actor but I think that any time you do a performance, you kind of take a little piece of that character, cause it's a part of you you're using.