Quotes About Acting

I was really young, just playing with puppets a lot and doing all the voices and acting it out - normal kid stuff. But then I'd hear my mother talking about it to her relatives, marveling at it as if it was something unique. And it made me realize, 'Oh, maybe I do have a talent for something.'

So the laughs had to come from the character, not because we had balloons in our shirts or were speaking in high voices. That was very important to us.

I always just want to do non-typical voices for some reason.

In all my years as an actor, I had never been me - I had always hidden behind my glasses, mustaches and funny voices.

I did a lot of acting, funnily enough, unprofessionally, as a kid. From when I was 10 years old until I was about 19, I was always doing little sketches with my friends, and doing different accents and voices.

I came from the stage so it was a different kind of acting, or a different arena of acting, and I just loved to do it as a kid. It's really gratifying to get to create these different characters and to get to create different voices and to get to wear different clothes.

As a young actor, I would be invited to the CBC radio drama department to do voices for different characters, and I found that I could do quite a few of them. I wasn't a visual presence, and I found it easier to construct a voice from the written page.

I used to wait tables at Gladstone's, a seafood restaurant, day in and day out. I made some of my best friends there. I taught dance and acting lessons to kids. It was awesome - an outreach program, Voices Unheard. I was a messenger for a couple of months.

Doing voices in animated movies has been one of my dreams. You get to go and act, and you don't have to put on makeup.

If I'm doing a voice-over session, like animation or something, and I'm doing three different voices, you've gotta separate them. You've gotta find the different places and do your different things.

When I'm playing an American, I don't play Lennie with an American accent. They're American characters who look like me, but they have different voices.

Just doing voices for cartoons is just a dream come true.

I would never ever want to be an actor playing anyone other than myself. I can't do voices or anything. No, it's not for me. There are lots of people who are trained actors and I feel it's offensive for me to do it.

I used to bury myself in character parts and put on a lot of makeup and use a lot of props. At first I thought it was clever to put on false noses and to do funny voices, but then I suddenly thought, no, that's wrong, you don't do it from the outside, you work from within.

I went to a strict elementary school with nuns, and uniforms that I'm pretty sure were made out of sandpaper. It was an academic, sports-oriented place. I liked to read, and wanted to act, and didn't try out for volleyball. I was weird. The other girls would dip my hair in ink and stuff.

I did a couple quick things with Nicole Kidman, and I really loved that. She was a really cool person to chat with and had a really lovely presence on set. I'm a big admirer of her work. It's amazing the volume of work she does.

Basically, I only play one character; I just play him at different volumes.

I'm a natural blonde. But when I started acting, I would go to auditions and they didn't know where to put me because I was voluptuous and had the accent, but I had blonde hair. It was ignorance: they thought every Latin person looks like Salma Hayek.

I was Aladdin, and then I was Captain Von Trapp from 'Sound Of Music' when I was 7 or 8, and then King Arthur. I was always the lead. I've always enjoyed being onstage, acting obnoxious, being someone that wasn't me, hiding behind a character.

I like the acting. It's how I started, and I sort of feel that if I don't give it a little shot now, and I go back, then I'm pretty much done with it. I mean, at what age am I going to do it at? Although, when you see Christopher Plummer and Max von Sydow doing it, I guess the answer is 80.

I have always had a longing to talk about this Nazi period because my parents' generation wouldn't talk about it after the war at all. From an actor's point of view, it's amazing to play in one year the Nazi Albert Speer and Claus von Stauffenberg.

I was modeling while I was in university and my agency said, 'There's this fashion campaign, can you go?' And I didn't want to; I told him I wanted to focus on my acting, but I ended up going, kind of dragging my feet, and it turns out, the casting director for it was the casting director for Lars von Trier's new movie.

When I was little, I was a voracious reader, and that really led me to acting as well. I loved being transported into someone else's life, and that's what reading provided me. I also really love to entertain people.

I wasn't one of the ones voted most likely to succeed when I was at drama school, but I persevered and concentrated on the acting rather than going to the right parties and getting the right agent. Eventually, after ten years, it paid off.