Quotes About Acting

I think Ryan Gosling is a really great actor who's meticulous about his work. And I'd love to have the guts that Johnny Depp has to actually go outside the box on a character. When he plays a character, he plays it in a way that nobody else would.

With acting, you can find a way to make it interesting for yourself, if nobody else - even on big-budget films. But you're very much on your own.

I auditioned for Lamorne Morris' part, Winston, on 'New Girl.' In the scene, the character was eating a mayonnaise sandwich. I thought, 'Nobody else is going to go into the audition eating, and this is how I'm gonna set myself apart.'

I'm an actor because I love acting, and my romance with this craft called acting is too intense. I'm in this business for a very selfish reason, and that is me, and nobody else. The audience loving it is by chance.

I don't know why there is so much noise on doing intimate scenes.

I started acting when I was seven. And I went to a local drama school which is very well-known in London. Because of that, I started getting jobs, and I worked all the time as a child, pretty much non-stop.

None of the characters I've played are really like me. That would be boring. That wouldn't be acting.

I wanted to go to New York and be a stage actress, doing things like Chekhov. None of that happened, and then I went to L.A. and an agent said, 'I think you belong in commercials and TV.' So I did that and got some opportunities that I absolutely love.

Playing characters who are wonderful and beautiful is hard because you don't feel like that most of the time... well, I don't. It's like this whole heart-throb nonsense. It's flattering, but that's not how I feel in the morning. It's something that goes with the job.

When it's a really dark emotional scene, you have to make the effort to shake it off, at the end of the day, before you go home to your kids and try to be a normal human being. You definitely want to make that effort to shake it off.

My parents are a big help, and they're always making sure I have a normal life and my life isn't all just about acting and stuff.

I think in some ways I'm quite lucky to be living in London, there's this certain separation from the movie business. In that way, it's been quite easy to separate acting and going back to a normal life.

That's one of the great things about being an actor. You get to learn all these things normal people don't get to learn.

If I was in a room with a bunch of skinheads talking about racism, then I would be disturbed, but after we finished a take, we were normal people again.

I don't know what I am. I guess you can call me a character actor in the sense that I'll never be an ingenue. You know, that's over. My shot was missed. I take a normal person and make them more of a character. I don't know what that would be called.

I started acting when I was young, and I didn't go to drama school. It was always something that I did alongside going to school and being a normal person.

Zhang is a friend of mine: he said forget about acting and just do normal things in the movie.

Normally I sit there in the films really hating watching myself. Loving watching the films, hating watching myself.

Normally, when you do a movie, you have those mundane days when it's like, 'Today is the scene where I get coffee.'

As an actress, it appeals to me because I love the idea of playing those in-between moments, the sort of behavioral stuff that one might not normally see.

It's a lot of fun to play someone you don't normally think of yourself as.

For the moment, whenever I read, it is normally scripts. You start a book and then you think, 'I should be reading these five scripts.'

Normally, it's difficult for me to watch a movie that I'm in.

In the work that I normally do, you have a whole script, a whole arc, that you play. And I do believe a good actor will play every bit of information they're given.