Quotes About Performance

I don't put a girl in a box and clap my hands three times, and she's gone. I get in the box, and I vanish, and I reappear at the other side of the stage. That way, people don't think, 'That's a great illusion.' They think, 'Doug's a great magician.'

The actor is there to translate what's on the page onto the stage or the screen. So I find it important that an actor manages to actually get out of the way, vanish as a person behind the character, never to be seen or talked about again. That's my philosophy.

Great players are very good technically, but they also have a huge amount of character because, without it, you will never get to see that great technique because it vanishes under pressure.

On stage, everyone stays put; the vantage point is always the vantage point, and you have to play to the size of the house. And of course, on film, there's different angles, different shots, so that determines how animated or how still you must be.

I think there's a huge amount of magic on television, which is slightly vapid: there's no real meaning or message behind it; it is simply a trick.

I spent a lot of time with my teams, especially in the East Coast teams, talking about dealing with the elements a lot of time, and a lot of instruction about field position and those kind of things. I like that variable.

There's variables at every single gig. I look forward to those every night. We have a lot of things that happen in our show, a lot of people from the outside watching the show might think it's one schtick after the next. We promised ourselves we have to be there mentally. We have to be aware. We are forced to be aware.

There's a lot of variables you can't control in trying to win a game, but at the end of the day it does mean something to win a game in the big leagues and be on the mound.

When you turn up at a ground, you expect the wicket to behave in a certain fashion and it doesn't. There are so many variables in this game. It becomes even more important when it comes to T20 cricket.

Every part I play is just a variant of my own personality. No real character actor, of course, just me.

Every impression that I do is just a terrible variation on an awful Bill Cosby impression. You're doing an Australian accent, but it's just Australian Bill Cosby; or that's just British Bill Cosby; that's Pirate Bill Cosby.

But if you ask me personally, when I am doing a negative role it comes real easy to me. It gives me the opportunity of bringing in attitude and a lot of variation.

If you bowl good yorkers in nets and come up with good variation, it helps your on-field performance.

When doing theater, you have to find great satisfaction in the small things. There's going to be a repetition and a redundancy night after night, but it's the small variations in those moments - a word, a tone of voice, the smallest sense of enlightenment that can happen in an instant onstage - that will be the most rewarding.

T20 cricket is all about using variations, and timing has to be perfect.

An actor's job is to find variations of the same emotion in his being so that every time he expresses grief or joy, it doesn't look the same.

For me, if I'm completely honest, I've always loved playing Captain Hook, also because I've gotten a chance to play so many different variations of him, so I haven't just been playing the same guy day in, day out.

In T20, you can show your variations; you can show your yorkers.

I have no problem doing the same type of roles. But those who understand acting technique, and watched me in 'Mardaani 2,' might have observed the nuances, variations I can bring into a character.

I have played a terrorist in 'Goodachari,' a feudal lord in 'Rangasthalam' and a factionist in 'AS.' The variations in all these characters are so different. It's only because of my directors that this was possible.

Gould recorded Bach's 'Variations' twice but the 1955 one was so fresh. He had a quirky approach to playing and he looked better than anybody: he would lean back on a tiny stool, wearing overcoats and scarves.

I think it's really, really important to mix it up as an actor, to try to get as much kind of varied experience as you can, not only for your own personal growth as an actor but for the audience to keep them guessing about what you're going to do.

I don't get to play the same role over and over in different movies. The roles that I get to play are quite varied, which is great.

I try to keep things as varied as possible in my career, and after playing something as fun and over the top as Maryann on 'True Blood,' I wanted to find something antithetical to that.