Quotes About Acting

It wasn't until entering my twenties that I began to identify my real dream as an actress.

With a recent birthday, I've been acting now for twenty years.

I went to acting school, and there were twenty other actors in my class who were exceptional. It's hard for anybody to get work. When I was trying to get jobs, I felt a responsibility to be respectful of the opportunities and take challenging things that could be interesting both for me as an actor and for the audience.

When you're just able to distill it down to the idea and the feeling that a character is experiencing in a scene, it can become very, very razor sharp and really clean and really efficient and simple. And sometimes it takes twenty-five years to learn how to be simple.

Even my mom is calling me Shaggy now, which is weird, because Shaggy is more like a character that I play. Shaggy is flamboyant; he's cocky. And I can't live that twenty-four hours a day - hell, no.

'Green Lantern' I screen-tested for twice. I fought for the role. And I'm glad I did, because I felt like I earned it.

I never want to play the same character twice. I like to do different roles. I have fun with that.

In 'Twice Born' I play my character in her 20s, 30s and 50s. For the fifty year old scenes, I had some prosthetics; it was interesting to see how I'm going to look when I'm fifty-five or so. I actually saw similarities between my grandmothers and my mother.

People told me I couldn't kill Nicholson, so I cast him in two roles and killed him off twice.

I don't like improvising on camera, particularly, but very often, a scene will not be working, and you rehearse it once or twice, and you realize something's missing. So I'll play with it until it makes sense.

I know that sounds dramatic, but shooting everything twice and going through the emotions of two different humans was crazy for me at 16. In terms of my career, that was something that really, really formed me.

I'll read a script maybe twice, but I'll think about the role more than I'll rehearse lines.

I had a dozen years to act before starting a family, then found that motherhood dwarfed everything else. Once or twice a year, I take a project that appeals to me for its redeeming social value.

I did 125 films, and over 100 television shows, and you've never seen the same character twice.

I played this character twice in live action, and now I've become an animated character. It was actually fun to see myself drawn - I've never been a drawn character before.

I've never got a part in the same way twice. I've never prepared the same way. I've never experienced the filming the process the same way.

I think I've only kissed a woman on screen only once or twice before in my whole career.

If you grow up in Britain, you just do Shakespeare. If you go and work in a theater once or twice or three times in your life, you're going to end up doing a Shakespeare, because he's obviously such a brilliant, brilliant writer.

I've had really a great choice of roles that have been very different from one another. And I think I kind of set out to do that when I began my career - to aim to never play the same thing twice.

Only twice have I really had a hard time leaving a character. The first was my character in 'Rome' and then in 'Homeland.'

'24' was so serious that it was nice to join 'NCIS' and even be able to smile once or twice.

I can act with either eye, but you've got to be twice as good as an actor to act with one eye. You need to put all your emotions just through one eye and really punch it out of that eye. I found it quite difficult to do at first, and then I found a technique that allowed me to act with one eye, which I patented.

Occasionally, I've been asked to do American roles, and once or twice I have, but I don't understand Americans. I don't have any real feeling for American culture.

It took me forever, learning improvisation, because I had studied with Lee Strasberg - I dropped out of Chicago and went to his classes in New York for a couple of years, once or twice a week. What I didn't realize was I was learning directing because he wasn't all that good about acting, not for me.