Quotes About Acting

Most of the time you spend filming a show is time you spend without the cameras on, when you're not acting.

I think when you're in the middle of a piece of work, there are things that bleed over into your life. You're spending a large portion of your day pretending to be somebody else, to tell somebody else's story.

When someone's acting for a scene, they can fool the camera. But in everyday life, unless you're watching and censoring yourself every minute, or spending all your time in the company of ladies, what you feel is bound to show in your eyes.

Well, a deficit reflects an imbalance between spending and revenue, and so narrowing it requires acting on one, the other or both.

I'm tough, I'm pushy, I'm really loud. I used to spend a lot of time thinking about it. But we only have so much brain capacity, so if I'm spending part of my brain thinking about how I'm acting, A, I'm not spending all of my brain doing, and B, I'm not actually in that moment.

If actors could actually make a living doing theater, that would be my first choice. Sitcoms are the closest thing to being onstage in front of an audience. If I had to choose, it would be theater and doing the occasional movie once in a while, and spending time doing nothing.

I'd never played a character as long as I played Poussey. Spending time with her, so much time embodying that character, it was so - and still is and always will be - so special to me and a part of who I am.

A lot of the time with child actors, you get the feeling they're trying to have a kind of poise or presentation that's beyond their years that might be put on, but also might be because they've spent years just hanging out with adults and they don't even have a sense of what it's like to grow up with kids their own age.

I remember in 'Pride and Prejudice' I had to do a scene where I broke down. And before we filmed I spent like three hours imagining my mum's funeral. Actually, she's very much alive, happy and healthy. It was really horrible.

I auditioned for 'Spider-Man.' I auditioned for 'Han Solo,' all those big movies. I would love to do something like that.

There's just nothing funnier or crazier than that - doing your Broadway debut as Spider-Man in 'Spider-Man' the musical. It was, like, the last thing I could have ever possibly imagined happening. I mean, I would tell people I was playing Spider-Man, and people would just break out laughing because it was so ridiculous!

I was playing a role and acting. But it was different than Spike Lee's movie. Spike can say 'cut' and move to the next scene. But I was pretending to be a white supremacist, one of them. I had to act like them to make the ruse a success.

I reached Delhi a few days early for the shooting of Gandhi, to prepare myself for the role by learning to spin the charkha, speak English correctly and take elocution lessons.

It's a lot easier, I think, to be an actor in a movie than to spin a joke on a sitcom.

Every audition is different, but I get incredibly nervous and insecure and worked up for however long I have to prep - that's when I get to spin. But you're not allowed to spin once you enter the room. Doubt really can't enter the room when you're auditioning - unless it's part of the character.

If you're playing a cop in a modern film, you don't have to walk with your spine straight up and bow before a fight. There's a lot of free form of expressing yourself as an actor.

As an actor it's your job to empathise with your character regardless of whether they have a different sexual orientation, spiritual beliefs, or anything.

I think the funny thing about acting for me - and I hold it in a very holy, spiritual way - not to be overly fundamentalist about it, but it's that important to me - is that it is an ancient healing art.

What I do is very spiritual to me. I can't really connect with things unless they are spiritual in nature, so I have to make acting spiritual for myself, and each role a spiritual journey for me.

I don't think my spirituality has affected my character. I feel like my character is much more cynical about his beliefs, and I think I have to kind of drop what I believe in order to play him.

I had to be sick for a scene in the first season, and we used some fruit smoothies with little banana chunks. I had to put it in my mouth and spit it out. It was absolutely delicious.

Doing 'Days of Our Lives' was fun. I always am happy when working on the set. I think it reminds me of my childhood, which, in spite of not being 'normal' in any way, was a happy one.

In spite of my parents being actors, I never took acting as a profession for granted and still don't.

I am not very good with languages. So, in spite of working in films in 17 different languages, I only follow my passion to act without getting worked up about the language.