Quotes About Acting

I've always used my own personal emotions and things that I've gone through in my life to build a character. The work that I do before a film feels almost like therapy, between me and whoever I'm playing.

I enjoy having the ability to play a variety of ethnicities. Being ethnically ambiguous allows me to explore many roles, and I enjoy being free to be whoever I want to be.

In auditions, you're not up against anyone else; you're both going in for the role, and it's like, whoever's right for it will get it. It's simple. It's not like, 'Oh I won!' There's never that element. It is very supportive.

What I like is the acting itself. But I'm a lousy celebrity. I'm not interested in selling my private life. I take my private feelings to the work, but I want there to be a difference between me and whoever it is I'm playing.

I walk into a scene, and I do the scene. That's my job. I don't have an objective. I have the words, and I have whoever I'm playing with.

I want to play whoever is opposite 'Iron Man.' I want to romance Robert Downey Jr.

When you're on stage, you're playing to whoever is in the back of the room, and TV and film is so much more detailed and nuanced, but I think that's what I always wanted to do. As much as I love theater and musical theater and would love to do it again, I really love the subtleties of film and theater acting.

I don't act in sex comedies, and whoever acts in them, I don't think it's bad, because cinema, art and theatre are the mirrors of society.

I owe my whole acting career to the fact that I'm a singer. I went out to Los Angeles and auditioned for a TV show called 'Fame L.A.' The original role was for a comedian, but they said I wasn't very funny, so they asked me, 'What else can you do?' So I played a singer.

I was in 'The Postman Always Rings Twice' with Jack Nicholson. That was fun. I think I made, like, $33 or something. I got to miss a whole day of school, and when you're a little kid, that's cool.

I thought I would spent my career doing Chekhov and Ibsen in regional theaters, so the fact that I started doing new plays was a whole new world I didn't expect, and that I would like to keep doing.

I had been acting for 40 years when politics beckoned. I didn't want to continue with a film career. It had to be politics wholeheartedly.

I sometimes want to do totally different roles. I don't always want to play 'wholesome.'

Ever since I found out I got the part on 'Gilmore Girls,' my life has been changing in so many ways. It seems as though all we get is good news. I'm just so grateful to be a part of it. It's a wholesome show with an edge. I have no idea how we pull it off.

Acting is usually regarded as a wholly narcissistic pursuit but there really is a hunger in me to unravel the human condition.

I run the Actor's Studio on the West Coast, and one of the things I say all the time to the people I teach - many of whom are acting teachers - is that an actor needs to make choices that make him present.

For me, there is a stigma attached to playing beautiful parts. They are often empty characters whom the action happens around. I'm more drawn to characters with a complex internal life, who have a burning frustration underneath that keeps them going.

I've learned through experience of playing different characters, some of whom were jerks, that when you play a character who is pretentious or obnoxious, in any way, it's important to knock them down a peg.

I didn't ever intend to or want to be an actor. I'm not one of those people of whom they say, 'If you can't live without it, that's the only reason you should be an actor.' It was kind of a sideline that became my whole life.

My professional acting life, stage and screen, has brought me public support, emotional fulfillment and material comfort. It has brought me together with fine people, good companions with whom I've shared the inevitable lot of all actors: flops and hits.

I'll tell you, being on set on 'Harry Potter' was nerve-wracking. It was surreal to be in a room with those three kids, all of whom know exactly what they're doing.

Some people are instantly brilliant. The Kenneth Branaghs of this world are ready-formed actors at 23 - he has used his success in lots of different ways - but there are people out there for whom acting is: 'Ooh, I can get on the telly and be famous.'

Who wouldn't want to play a character whose bottom you get to know before the face?

Acting-wise, I've had all these experiences. Yet when I look at certain people whose careers I admire, they've gotten to play so many different characters.