Quotes About Performance

There is the real person I am, and there is the stage persona.

But when you work with the director and the real person who is playing opposite you, it changes everything. You are almost in a working session. I was very comfortable, and that's maybe what helped me to get the part.

None of the characters I played was very close to me as a real person.

You feel a huge sense of responsibility when you're playing a real person.

I don't care who you are, if you're not feeling anxious before playing in a final, you're not a real person. I don't care who you are.

There is a sense of responsibility when you play a real-life character because there are people who will see your work, make comparisons, and judge you. They have all the rights to do that because they know the real person. They might have seen that person also.

Johnny Nitro was like Johnny Hollywood, Johnny Danger, Johnny Blaze... it's just an obvious stage, Hollywood name. But John Morrison is more like a real person.

As an actor, I love playing something kind of outside of who I am as a real person.

The real reason you want to give everything on the field is so your own fans go away happy.

They're just actors. I much prefer the real thing!

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.

You're playing games every two or three nights, so there's no real time off.

One of the reasons why good actors are good is that they have poor impulse control. If you put them in front of a camera, they respond as if it was actually happening, in real time, rather than doing it after several takes.

I feel like some of the delivery that people find funny is literally me trying to remember the exact line in real time.

To go out on the ice and do some real work, it's been really nice.

What people don't realise is that it is the script which plays the most important factor in making or breaking a chemistry.

I'm getting older; you realise you are on the countdown of what you are doing, so performing means more than it ever did to me.

If I've done a gig and at the end there are people waiting for autographs, they always seem nervous, but they probably don't realise that I'm more nervous than them. I get very embarrassed.

I used to play as a No. 10, in Bilbao, in most of the games, but when I came to United, when you come to one of the biggest clubs in the world, you realise that if you want to be a No. 10, you have to score 10, 12 goals per season.

In most films, when we act, we don't see such meanings in what we do. Rather, we don't realise it. Only when we see it as a continuous film later on do we realise such deep meanings. That is the brilliance of the director.

When you act you realise acting is not that difficult - the other technicalities are, like the mark, angle, light, etc. So you just not have to memorise your lines but keep in mind the mark, the angle and light. It is difficult.

One day you look out and the audience consists of 65,000 people. It's like looking in the mirror and one day you realise you've gone grey.

My dream is to produce a generation of actors who realise what the function of an actor in a movie is supposed to be.

Dancers should realise that they are really lucky. Dancing is not a job. It's people who are chosen. And you must realise that you are chosen. Sometimes I see a performance that makes me really angry - I think, 'Those people are lucky, and they don't realise it.'