Quotes About Acting

I went to America to get away from constantly being cast in costume dramas, playing posh people.

I'm finding a lot of actors my age now who are a bit more like me, and not as posh or brought up in a certain way. There's now people of all sorts of kinds of backgrounds.

If I keep doing films like 'The Riot Club' they're going to think I'm a posh git.

People assume I'm posh because I'm one of the acting dames. I grew up in Tottenham and didn't used to speak like I do now.

I get told I have a 'period' face quite often. Maybe it's the pale skin but I get a lot of pre-Forties posh roles.

Acting is very personal. I don't want to be like anybody else. There are positions I would like to be in - like Meryl Streep's, for instance.

If you believe - which I do - that acting is a bit like advocacy for your character, then of course I want to find the positive points.

I think that I've always been attracted to characters who are positive and come from a very innocent place. I think there's a lot of room for discovery in these characters, and that's something I always have fun playing.

My job is to take out the negativity from a positive guy and take out the positivity from a negative guy. I don't play positive or negative roles. This is what I find fascinating about acting.

I have a checklist of things I'd like to do in movies. One of them is get possessed. Die on a deathbed with a ghostly pallor - that's on my list.

I did a couple of movies when I was little. You have to be possessed to be an actress, and I was not possessed... It was not my life's passion.

You can play anyone if you're open enough. It's a form of possession. Each time you work on something, you allow yourself to be possessed by creating the environment for it. Then you allow the possession to happen - but not at the expense of your sanity or of your identity.

You get very possessive about characters, you feel you can see it in your mind and you want to play it.

If I'm not clear with the character, I can't do anything with it. But once I get that character, the possibilities are endless. When you have such a defined character, I feel like I can actually read the phone book and make it funny.

I had wanted to act since I was a kid, but I had a lot of shame attached to it. I didn't tell anyone because I didn't think it was ever a possibility.

I was always goofing around. I suppose having a father who was an actor made you think that it was a real possibility as a career.

My job is usually to express emotion as freely as possible.

I want to play women my own age, rather than artificially 'de-age' myself so that I can play women who are younger or much younger than I am. I want to grow into those kind of more mature parts, not try and keep them at bay for as long as I possibly can.

I have too much respect for the characters I play to make them anything but as real as they can possibly be. I have a great deal of respect for all of them, otherwise I wouldn't do them. And I don't want to screw them by not portraying them honestly.

The most fun you can possibly have as an actor is to walk that line between what's real and what's interesting.

One thing I like about trying to write is that I can possibly write myself a role. Otherwise, you're at the mercy of whatever roles are out there that people are willing to give to you.

I'm forever being told that I'm an odd-looking actress, so it's great playing parts where there's no vanity. You just look as rough as you possibly can!

There was a scene in 'Qubool Hai' where Asad shoots his father. After shooting for it, I was drained completely. At times, my character's mood gets very depressing. Post shoot, it takes a good half hour to get out of character, to leave Asad behind.

Post my graduation, I really thought that acting was something I wanted to do. I simply took a chance and started auditioning, and I loved it.