Quotes About Acting

I am an actress and acting is my passion... period!

I love changing my roles. I think the most important thing that I can do for myself is to keep changing the genres, the periods, the characters themselves.

I have no idea what my draw is for science fiction. I hope they come to me because they like complicated women. But I've never played the Bionic Woman. In 'Sarah Connor' and 'Lost,' I am not the orchestrator of what happens. I've played quite peripheral people.

People think I'm a very serious actor, which I am. But you know, if you don't have a sense of humor doing what I do, you perish.

It can have an enormous effect because big budget movies can have big budget perks, and small budget movies have no perks, but what is the driving force, of course, is the script, and your part in it.

I would love to do things that teach me new skills. Like, I don't know how to ride a horse. And not that I need a film or television project to teach me that, but it's one of the perks of being an actor, inhabiting a character who has experiences and a knowledge that I don't.

My father calls acting 'a state of permanent retirement with short spurts of work.'

The thing I hate most in acting is asking permission to do things. What you really want to do is say, 'This is my need; this is what's going to get me further; this is what's going to be alive. I don't ever say, 'Do you mind if...?' I just come in and do it.

You can't really fake chemistry: either you have it or you don't, and you can't have a relationship on screen if you don't have one off screen. I love Sarah Paulson. I absolutely adore her. My wife has given me full permission to love Sarah Paulson, and I look forward to doing that for the rest of my life.

Acting is a job of permission. Someone has to give you permission to do it. But I have started to be like, 'I only want to do things that I want to do,' and writing has afforded me the luxury.

I am open to playback singing, but only if my acting schedule permits. I would love to sing for myself in my films, but that depends on the director and if the makers think my voice is needed.

Acting is equal parts talent and perseverance.

It's the persona that makes you a leading actor. A leading actor has something extra that's fun to watch. But it isn't usually about acting.

It's easier to see in someone else, another actor, how they kind of disappear and then this other persona appears. A great actor is a thing of mystery.

I play characters. I don't think I really have a persona per se. I don't play the same guy every time. I show up, you don't know what I'm gonna do. I like it that way. I've intentionally tried to do it that way. I think that's what's interesting.

I've been working as an actress since I was very young, and I know a lot of people who are actors who don't have to deal with having a persona... You know, if you look up the word persona, it isn't even real. The whole meaning of the word is that it's made up, and it's like I didn't even get to make up my own. It can be annoying.

Well, you create your own persona, don't you? And you have to live with that. But the people that I meet, they don't think that I'm a lunatic. And if they do, then that's OK, because it means that I'm playing the parts all right.

Sometimes in Brazil, I work harder to make characters different and believable and to overcome the persona I have.

The hard part for me was being an Olympic gold medalist and having that persona; you don't see too many Olympic gold medalists go into acting. It's actually even more difficult. You're not taken very seriously, and you're looked at in a different light, so it was kind of hard for me to go straight from Olympics into acting.

In my career, I really set out not to develop too strong a persona so that you wouldn't have a hard time imagining me in any given role. I wanted to pleasantly confuse the audience on who I was.

When I'm in public doing the glamorous-wife-of-rock-star persona, I don't want to disappoint, but when I act, I really like to leave all that behind.

As you mature and gain a semblance of wisdom and a sense of what life is all about... this is by no means true of everyone, but a lot of actors like to escape themselves. Inhabiting another person's persona is often a good way of escaping yourself.

So it was just funny to read a script that was just similar to what had been going on in my life.

Well thank you, Trudi," Now falsely modest again. "But I Don't think I won the scene." "Well, of course, you did," dismissing his protest. "You had all the dialogue but," she warns him. "In our big scene tomorrow, that's another story. So watch out.