Quotes About Acting

In life, I had to be prim and proper and poised - The King Daughter. But acting, I could be the zany, silly, sometimes foolish person that I am. I could let the raw edges show.

A lot of the stuff I do is broad, physical, quite silly.

I'm not looking at any stage stuff at all. I'm going to give that a break for a while, if not forever, because I've done a huge amount of stage stuff and if the possibility of working in pictures comes along, I'd be silly if I didn't grab it.

When I moved to New York to start my acting career, I was always very, very careful to walk way around ladders, and black cats could ruin my day. There were many silly things that brought fear into my life.

A lot of comic actors derive their main force from childish behavior. Most great comics are doing such silly things; you'd say, 'That's what a child would do.'

Picking from previous works I've watched, I really liked Jennifer Lawrence's 'Silver Linings Playbook.' It made me want to play that kind of role some day.

Whatever I want to do or say, I get to do it on the silver screen, so in normal life I don't feel the necessity to do or say anything.

The image of Ireland is projected as a male image in the acting world, similar to the way that the word of Ireland is male dominated.

I would quite like to do a different accent or play something so different from myself because Olivia, the character I play in this film, is similar to me.

If you look at my acting career, I never played a role that was similar to anything my brother played. I was always cast as the bad guy or a gangster, because my brother didn't do those kind of roles.

I love it and it is a blessing to be able to have seventy-five to eighty episodes to develop a character and find your voice. You have a similar through voice, and yet you are making different decisions, and so you act differently and you make different choices, as that is what your character would do.

The biggest research of all when I do a character is self-examination. You look at yourself and you ask, 'How am I similar to this person and how am I different?'

When you look at the early-'30s movies, like King Kong, the codes of acting are very similar to those of silent movies. In some of the silent movies - the good ones, the ones done by the best directors - the acting is very, very natural.

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

I don't want to discredit people's individuality, but I think people are pretty much the same. People are very similar. If you have a good enough imagination then you can feel things that you personally have never done before. That's acting.

I would love to be able to play some characters on television that are similar to some of the indie film roles I've done, that have been so close to my heart.

It's so funny because the roles that I've been offered in the indie film world have been similar to each other, and the roles that I've been offered in the TV world have been similar to each other, but the TV roles and the indie film roles have been completely different.

Working on 'Housewives' was very similar to 'Sex and the City.' Different cities, of course, but a high level of talent in the writing and acting on both!

I'm not a method actor per se, but if I'm playing a character that, at its core of its persona, has experiences I don't have, I try to search out and get firsthand experiences of similar sorts so I have something to fantasize about.

With acting, you do want to get every job, and you're trying to get every audition, but then you reach a certain stage where you start to kind of gravitate toward the stories and the people that have a similar heartbeat.

I don't really get a buzz from playing characters that are similar to me 'cause that's not acting to me.

Sometimes it's hard to play someone so similar to you, because you can muddy the character. Often, it's easier to play someone further away from you, because it's clearer who they are.

When I was younger and really interested in acting, I would look at all the women on TV, and even the ones who were supposed to be 'geeks' or 'less attractive,' they all looked similar because they were extremely attractive and their bodies were all a certain way.

I'd love to play characters that are so similar to me that it would be crossing limits, and then at the same time I would love to play characters that are so different from me that it would be that kind of challenge as well.