Quotes About Acting

To me, part of the fascinating profession of acting is to participate in all these strange situations, to try to understand all these interesting characters, fictitious or real, their human nature... It's extraordinarily fascinating.

I've always been, with acting, very hesitant to get myself into situations where I would be accused of nepotism.

You really have to act on the force, too. You're involved in a hundred things a day, and you have to react in a hundred different ways, depending on what's going on. And you learn that as you go through your career, how you handle certain situations, interrogations, how you carry yourself. There's a kind of acting to it.

I don't find the characters I've played funny. The characters are actually taking their situations very seriously.

I try and imagine myself in situations and figure out how I'd have reacted and responded to them, and then bring that insight into my acting. Much of acting is about borrowing from your real-life experiences.

The next night I got on an airplane, and flew to New York and looked into acting schools. Four or five acting schools. One of which was the Neighborhood Playhouse, which I started at six months there after.

Improv kind of goes hand in hand with what I do. I was on 'Reno 911!' for six years, and that was a completely improvised show.

'Hollyoaks' is where I learnt a lot of the craft, being in front of a camera six days a week. That's certainly an experience you don't get in drama school. It invites you to be comfortable in front of the camera.

I did grow up in Los Angeles. I actually didn't start acting until I was sixteen, so I was very removed from the Hollywood scene. I had always been in my school plays, but my mom and dad wanted to keep me out of the business until I was old enough to know who I was and not let anyone change me.

I love making movies, and being in any that I can be in. I'd like to be in those giant movies, as the fifth or sixth lead, and have three or four killer scenes. You don't have the responsibility of the entire movie being on you. I like those roles. I'm shooting for the middle.

What I truly get excited about is not the genre of a movie or the size of a part - it's character. I like to find characters.

I couldn't care less about who sees my bits... My friends asked how I could do scenes like that and not get excited, but it wasn't like that. My bits looked the size of a cashew nut!

I like character-driven stuff. It doesn't matter, the size of the part.

So many of my characters have really crazy physicalities, so it's really fun to be able to say, like, 'I'm an elf who's the size of a dollar bill!'

If I'm trying to put size on for a role, then I don't do much running.

I am not hugely famous; I am not a name. For me, it's not the size of the role, it's the material and the people you are working with.

You need to find the size of performance that's appropriate to the material, appropriate to the shot, or appropriate to the scene.

So for me having that element of being able to be competitive wasn't a problem. I'm very competitive. I thought if I could skate first, acting would come second. I could say my lines and then go do what I was saying. You don't have to fake it, you're not really acting.

Most of the time when I receive a script, it says something like 'Rosenberg is the fat, slovenly Mayor, who doesn't want the kids to use the Skateboard Park', or 'Stein is a pompous, rotund attorney, imposing to all.' It would be so freeing to get a script where my character is simply described as 'A Man.'

Acting is easier than skating in a way and harder in other aspects. In skating, you get one chance, and with acting you get to do it over and over.

At this point, I feel fairly comfortable in terms of performance. I think having a sketch background actually helps a lot. Because my background is acting, and stand-up, in a lot of ways, is acting.

I moved to Chicago and I did theater, and then I started writing and I stop acting and I did sketch. You know, I did all of the things that, if you were serious about doing television, don't do.

There's sketch, improv, writing, acting, music, and badminton. Those are the seven forms of comedy. But I do like the idea of being an auteur in the sense of writing and being in your own stuff.

I once played Jennifer Lopez's werewolf body double in a sketch. I don't think anyone was shocked when the sketch got cut after dress rehearsal.