Quotes About Actors

The events we have passed through form a coherent pattern and the political actors who have shaped the world are rational--if not necessarily moral or decent--actors. Americans tend to think of its leaders as fools and knaves and of its enemies as psychotic. This seems to comfort us. While America's leaders might be knaves, they are not fools, and while our enemies might have utterly different moral values that are repugnant to us, they are far from insane.

The theatre is an attack on mankind carried on by magic: to victimize an audience every night, to make them laugh and cry and suffer and miss their trains. Of course actors regard audiences as enemies, to be deceived, drugged, incarcerated, stupefied. This is partly because the audience is also a court against which there is no appeal.

When I come onto a show where I haven't met any actors, I try to zero in on the script and what's expected of the character I'm going to play and hopefully keep my focus on that, and friendships develop from that.

A perfect example is 'Zero Dark Thirty.' That's the closest thing to reportage that I've done because a lot of that was shooting from the hip and found images and giving the actors a lot of freedom to explore the space and not have to repeat their actions twice and basically workshop on-camera.

Actors require flexibility, a kind of openness and readiness to leave their comfort zone.

As actors you're always going to take certain roles that are in your comfort zone and take ones that aren't.

I think actors tend to be in their element when they are pushed out of their comfort zone.

For actors in Hollywood, it's very straightforward. We're well-paid animals in a zoo.

There are some great roles - mostly in Shakespeare's tragedies which no one can play at full strength from beginning to end. One simply hopes that one can hit the peaks as often as one has the strength.

Actors are the only honest hypocrites.

When actors begin to think, it is time for a change. They are not fitted for it.

You need three things in the theatre - the play, the actors and the audience and each must give something.

Architecture (is) a theatre stage setting where the leading actors are the people, and to dramatically direct the dialogue between these people and space is the technique of designing.

The critic is the duenna in the passionate affair between playwrights, actors and audiences - a figure dreaded, and occasionally comic, but never welcome, never loved.

As actors, you live in doubt; that's one of the truths of the particular job.

In the pre-production process, I am emailing with the actors or jumping on the phone, and we're sort of figuring out who the characters are and trying to build the relationship dynamic and things like that. Then, also, I am outlining.

Actors are given songs that suit their voice and skill. At the same time, those songs which have a complicated tune and need expertise to perform should be given to trained singers.

Many times good actors I have known in New York accept series. I tune in at the beginning of the new season and think 'He's really working.' But six months later, if I tune in again, the actor is on a treadmill, grinding it out as best he can, and he can't help it.

In the face of a rising China, along with authoritarian regimes from Brazil to the Philippines to Turkey to Russia, and the constant presence of belligerent non-state actors, we need to reform our military to deal with asymmetrical threats.

Actors are terrible at overthinking things before they turn up to work, and they decide on a way they're going to do it, and then it's hard to break them out of it.

I've turned my guest house into this little studio, and we have actors come over and do readings.

Film directing has perfected my theater directing. I think when I first started directing, a lot of my stuff was very lateral; I was afraid to have the actors' backs turned away, afraid to put them too far upstage, and I think once I did more things with film, I got more interested in composition.

The one immutable reality of film is, no matter how wonderful the actors and the performances are, every year the actors age and grow older - Sophie Turner's Jean Grey was wonderful!

When actors have the opportunity to play a larger-than-life icon - my wife did it with Tina Turner, and Jamie Foxx did it with Ray Charles - you have to make a decision how you go in. What do you start with? Where do you begin?