Quotes About Acting

In television you don't have a lot of time to spend with the role or the script. Typically you get a script a week prior to shooting. Sometimes it's even less time, not enough time to dream about the role.

As a kid I would watch 'SCTV,' 'Saturday Night Live,' 'Monty Python' and 'The Kids in the Hall,' and be amazed that these guys got to be different people every week. It spoke to the acting side in me.

A lot of the time, you're supposed to play to the top of your intelligence, as truthful as possible. But when you're on stage making people laugh, you're still acting. I think it helped me a bunch to go on stage two or three times a week.

In actual fact, I doubled 'Twelfth Night' and 'The Avengers'. I was going backwards and forwards to Stratford. I played matinees Wednesday, matinee and evenings Saturdays, and the other days of the week, I was filming in Elstree.

I was the female lead in a romantic comedy. It's a little indie film that we shot in China called 'America Town,' starring Daniel Henney and Bill Paxton. I actually had to speak Chinese in the film. It was funny because I found out I was doing the film and then a week later, I was in Shanghai.

A lot of people don't know that I had a special appearance in 'Keratam'; that was my first Telugu film. I only shot for four to five days. When they called me, I said, 'I can't give 60 days for a movie. If you have something for one week or 10 days, then I can accommodate.'

Then I was actually meant to be going home but for some reason I decided to extend for a week. Then on the final day by extension, finally an audition came through, and it was 'Into the Badlands'.

Taking a role in a drama series takes a lot of energy, as new episode must be made every week.

I'd been acting since I was a teenager. I'd come to the point where I was writing my own movies of the week for TV. That was fun.

My father is an actor, so he brought me into his agency when I was young. It wasn't something I wanted to do until high school, when I started taking theater and really liked it. Then an agent found me and wanted me to come out to Los Angeles and give it a shot. I gave myself six months, but it only took me like a week to get a job.

I feel like I don't mind acting in a sitcom because it pays well and is good exposure, but I don't feel like, comedically, what I have to say I can say on a show that needs to draw 14 million each week.

Portland is the perfect weekend getaway. I studied acting in Portland and lived there for five years. It's a small city with so much to do. There's beautiful scenery, a great bar scene, and so many fabulous restaurants.

What I'm doing is making sure that I have a balance, and that allows me, I think, to be a better actor and to more easily and quickly access all of the emotions on the scale. I make sure that I read a book on the weekend or read something or do my knitting or do the things that I need to do for myself, like 'Game of Thrones.' Get that balance.

You could do a scene that takes 15 hours, but in the movie, it's only 10 minutes. The scene where they put the sauce poisoning in; it took eight hours.

If you're dealing with personal kind of acting, you're not going to want to open up and expose it to everybody, because that's where the power lies, you know? It would be a little like showing your hand in poker, and then hoping you can still win.

Both 'Saraswatichandra' and 'Mahakumbh' are extremely close to my heart. The shows are polar opposites and so are the characters but I have loved being a part of both of them.

It is as polar opposite as it comes for the man who was Edna Turnblad in 'Hairspray' to come back as Sweeney Todd.

I still assume that, any day, I'm going to be exposed as a fraud. That, like I once heard Gene Hackman say, the acting police are going to burst in and take away my card.

I've always wanted to play a police officer or a detective, because I think if I wasn't an actress that is what I would want to do.

We met in Cracker. I played a maniac fan who murders a policeman and she did my makeup. I thought anyone interested in me looking like that must have genuinely liked me.

I'm a policeman on television but an absolute wuss in real life.

Do you know, I didn't play a policeman up until I was 40, and then suddenly that's what I have been asked to play.

Maybe I have some god-given gift to act as a policeman.

When doing films, ones acting skills are polished, and the actor delivers a better performance.