Quotes About Acting

Preparing for roles sounds so academic, doesn't it? It feels as if you are preparing for an examination! In a creative medium, the preparation is of an entirely different kind, and for me, the ideas flow from the script itself.

I always acted in high school. Actually, I started in preschool. I was in a play about Jesus. I went to a Catholic school and played an angel and recited some poem about Jesus. It felt so long to me at the time.

I do wear prescription glasses off screen, though I didn't wear them to any of the auditions until the read-through.

I always look at the motives behind each scene. You can play that out tonally with how you express yourself or you can do that with your physical expression, your physical presence. So I always think about what physical presence I want to embody in each scene.

Why do you act? You act for an audience. In the theatre, you're in their presence. Film stars don't know what it is to have an audience.

Meryl Streep does things I would never have thought possible... Her presence on screen is outstanding.

I've always been cast in authority roles; I think because I have that presence... Comedically, I can play against that pretty well. I enjoy playing that arrogant ignorance. That's one of my favorite games to play in comedy.

The biggest impact that acting and theater had was, of course, stage presence, but it also had a big impact on my writing.

One of the things I like about performing on the stage is that it is a kind of meditative experience. Time does stand still. You have no concept or feeling of the passing of two or three hours' time. It's all kind of one present moment, which is a kind of a description of meditation.

I actually began my career by convincing my parents to let me be an actress when I was 12 with a PowerPoint presentation describing acting and my goals.

For me, acting is a series of impressions rather than trying to find one line through to the end, which risks becoming more of a presentation.

Actors sometimes immerse themselves into it so deeply that the line between who they are and their character can become blurred. For me, I think it's just about getting clearer on my whole life and who I am in order to make it possible for me to play whatever character is presented to me at a particular time.

I didn't sit around thinking, 'I'd love to play Luke Cage,' but when the character was presented, I did my research, and I was just like, 'This is a real gift. He's a great character, and I'm happy to have a chance to take a crack at him.'

I never set out to be an actor. Again, my mother presented this job by job to me at the time, and if it sounded fun, I would say yes and if it didn't, I would say no. I always knew, since I was 7 or 8 years old, that it was a means to an end and that I wanted to go to college.

I'd done performance art sporadically from about 1976 - very personal street things on my own. Acting seemed like a natural step from that. But I didn't really want to 'be' anything: presenter, comic, actor. I just wanted to perform.

Home gigs can be hard because it's an odd collision. More than anything, I feel self-conscious when my family are in the audience. I'm doing this job which is not quite acting - part of it is me, part performance. You're presenting a cartoon of yourself to people who know you as a line-drawing.

Acting and writing are the things I like doing. I don't like presenting that much.

With the selection of Acting Secret Service Director Joseph P. Clancy as the director, President Obama has guaranteed that the agency will continue to lurch from one shocking security failure to another.

I love acting but I don't like all of the other stuff associated with it. The interest in celebrities, the press, the Internet, when your identity becomes mixed up in the way people are preceving you.

I'm not one of these actors who feels a pressing need to direct, and I have no plans to do it.

If you can lie, you can act, and if you can lie to crazy girlfriends, you can act under pressure.

I think it's just a lot more pressure to make the scenes work when you're doing a film, because when you're doing a series you feel like, I have so many scenes, so many episodes, so if I don't get it exactly right this time, I have another scene later. You feel less pressure.

When I begin shooting, I get nervous, as I am under pressure to do my job well.

There is less pressure as a character actor. It generally means that you will be acting for all of your life, which is my intention. It is not my intention to just be a rich and famous person, that would be pretty boring.