Quotes About Acting

Acting is fun, and if you enjoy doing it, you should take it seriously and see what you can do. It's been a blast, and so you know it was kind of like a test for me to move to L.A. and start studying and see how much I was really into it. Cause I wasn't gonna do it if I wasn't 100% committed.

My own feelings of where I am in this world and the questions that I am asking myself, I started to explore them through the story 'Four Feathers' and through this actor called Heath Ledger. I knew that I had to find a 21-year-old who could play wisdom at the end. He's only 21 or 22, and I tested him.

I've tested for I-don't-know-how-many pilots, and I didn't get any of them. I would always try to go off the top and make it as spontaneous as possible, but acting in sitcoms is such a skill set, and I didn't have it. I wish I did back when I was younger.

For me, acting is becoming naked in front of people, you know? And when you know in the back of your mind somebody is testing you, you cannot really bare yourself. That's a feeling I always have when I'm auditioning.

In between shooting for 'Awake,' I was attempting to have my own pilot season. The audition for 'Anger Management' actually came during a week that I was already testing for a couple other shows and we weren't really letting any other shows into the mix.

The pilots I did test for, I was the only black actor testing against white actors for parts that were written white.

I knew Jimmy Dean. He tested for 'Battle Cry'. Paul Newman tested for 'Battle Cry'. I did nine tests to finally get that role.

This is not a tough job. You read a script. If you like the part and the money is OK, you do it. Then you remember your lines. You show up on time. You do what the director tells you to do. When you finish, you rest and then go on to the next part. That's it.

I hate auditioning. I just can't do it. I get so nervous, like cripplingly nervous. I'm bad at them, and I feel awful afterward.

I haven't really decided to be an actor yet! I started doing plays when I was about 15 or 16. I only did it because my dad saw a bunch of pretty girls in a restaurant and he asked them where they came from and they said drama group. He said, 'Son, that is where you need to go.'

When you try to act from what you don't really feel inside, it becomes harder to become effective at it.

Robin Atkin Downes

Comedy is acting out optimism.

It's what still excites me most about acting: letting your imagination go places it's never been before. There's nothing better than that.

She'd been acting the role of the scary woman for years because deep down inside she was scared. Scared of being alone. Scared that she'd had all her chances at happiness and blown each and every one of them.

I'm not acting!" shouted Cleo. She was in desperate need of more gloss.

Forget being a decent man, Terence. Go for castability. Could you even play a decent man in a movie?

They were in performance. They were performing their marriage at me.

From Charades: when she was younger she was a frustrated mother, so she is pleased when her children act as is they don't remember

Yes, Father, I have played so many parts that I shall not fail now but enjoy the masquerade, since I have a partner in it

talking with him made me realize I wasn't the only one. "I mean, it's like everybody's acting out a part," he'd tell me. "They say stuff they don't really think, or do stuff they don't really feel like doing, and after a while you find yourself acting the same way.

The actor's life offers, on a daily basis, the simulacrum of love; a mask can be satisfied, or at least consoled, by the echo of what it seeks.

Strength of character is already written. What we bring, as an actor, is an almost 3D-ness to it.

On set is where I feel comfortable. The red carpet stuff, talking about the film, explaining your own life, it doesn't come naturally. It's all necessary stuff I suppose but it's not my strength.