Role Preparation Quotes

As an actor, you use the things from yourself that you can apply to the character.

I love meat - I'm Cuban; I grew up eating meat, platanos, and arroz con pollo. I don't believe in starving yourself, but sometimes I do cleanses and diets to prepare for a role.

When I research a role it does get a little crazy and maybe even a little stupid.

I still don't really think about acting that much. I just do it.

There are plus-size women who've paved the way - Rebel Wilson, Gabby Sidibe, Melissa McCarthy. I can't wait for the day when I can have a conversation, and it's not about the size of my pants but how I prepared for the role.

I think it's so hard to get really, really strong parts where the actress can act. It's rare.

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.

As an actor you bring some of your own experiences which can make things easier. You build off of it, but your imagination is always the best thing you have as far as creating things I think specifically for what that character is going through. But you're definitely drawing obviously upon things that you can connect to, and then you kind of mold the change that you're making into something that's right for the character.

If I'm trying to put size on for a role, then I don't do much running.

Every time when I start preparing my character for a movie, I always try to make up and create my own background story for the role in order to fill it with life.

I've noticed a growth in Spike and definitely in myself. I feel like the seeds that he planted in me five years ago have ripened up to a place where I could even tackle this role in the way that I did.

I'm a better person when I'm preparing for a role, when I'm studying a role.

Preparing for roles sounds so academic, doesn't it? It feels as if you are preparing for an examination! In a creative medium, the preparation is of an entirely different kind, and for me, the ideas flow from the script itself.

What I mostly do is take the script, analyse the hell out of it, see what's in there, see what kind of person I'm dealing with, and then forget I'm playing a father and just play a person who exemplifies all those things.

I had never come across the 'X-Men' comics till I was asked to play Magneto, so I just jumped into that job.

As an actor, I think every moment in your life is giving you a new set of tools. You’re constantly absorbing new information that you can put back onto the screen.

I've tried to take roles with great demands.

I had an edge in 'Andhadhun' because, being a musician, I knew how to play a guitar, so it was not difficult for me to learn a musical instrument.

I don't feel like I properly started acting until I did my first play, 'Tusk, Tusk.'

In the acting game, you spend a long time fighting against what the director perceives you to be. And half the time the directors don't know.

I wasn't a dancer learning to play Baby Houseman. I was Baby Houseman learning to play a dancer. I was someone who'd never done any Latin dance. I'd taken jazz classes and ballet growing up in New York, so I had dance in me, and I knew I loved it, but I'd never done a dance audition.

That's my way in the very beginning - how to enter it [a role]. Very quickly in the process, I don't think about voice being separate from the way you hold your head or the way you sit or the way you put on lipstick. It's all a piece of a person, and it's all driven by conviction.

I like, for instance, 'Serpico.' I enjoyed playing Serpico because Frank Serpico was there. He existed. He was a real life person and I could - I could embody him. I could, you know, I could work and get to know him and have him help me with the text, the script and become him. It's almost like a painter having a model to become.

While playing complex characters you're staying in the same place but you're departing with your mind and soul and educating yourself until you can really understand such huge worlds. Those are the roles that keep loyal to the authenticity of what people are, and not caricatures. It's something that requires me to prepare for three, four months. I love the process of it, rather than, "Okay, I'm ready, I'm set with the wardrobe that somebody else chose for me."

I can be such a Little Lord Fauntleroy about what I even audition for.