Quotes About Acting

One day, out of irritation, I said, you know all of those years with the Royal Shakespeare Company, all those years of playing kings and princes and speaking black verse, and bestriding the landscape of England was nothing but a preparation for sitting in the captain's chair of the Enterprise.

I did a crazy version of 'Romeo and Juliet' once, and I played Romeo.

When you act, you're always playing a version of yourself. You can't bring more to the role than what you are.

My first trip abroad was to do a TV version of 'Les Miserables' in France with Anthony Perkins. There I was at 12 acting with the guy from 'Psycho.' My parents were teachers, and it was hard for them to relate to that world.

I fell into acting because I was really shy, and so at night after work, I took public speaking and improv classes, and I started going to auditions sort of as a dare. That was my version of 'Fear Factor.'

I had quite a bit of experience doing things that had been adapted from a book and playing real-life characters and playing the younger version of actors. That's kind of my thing.

As an actor, you are either emulating someone else, or some version of yourself.

As a child actor, you haven't been allowed to be yourself for most of your life; you've been constrained by the demands of your job, your parents, directors. A fictional or amplified version of you exists, but when you're 17, you can't have a debate with yourself about authenticity.

One of my favourite pieces is 'Antony and Cleopatra' - I'd love to be in that. Or an alternative version of 'Romeo & Juliet' where I get to play Mercutio, something like that.

I'm getting a lot of stick because my character in 'Young Dracula' wanted to be vampire, so now that I am a vampire, everyone's like, 'You finally did it!' But it's cool and I loved doing 'Young Dracula.' That show's finished and I don't know why it ended, so it was brilliant to go into 'Being Human,' which is like the adult version of it.

Since I am not actually a real human being, my emotional responses are generally limited to what I have learned to fake.

Anybody can be charming if they don`t mind faking it.

But she wasn't, and here she was again in the middle of a situation that called for fake smiles and bullshitting, two talents that were as alien to her as a Klingon mating dance.

Yellowface enables racist caricature—but it also denies Asian actors the opportunity to play Asian roles.

But by the time Madeleine reached the age that Alwyn had been then, she realized that her sister's iconoclasm and liberationist commitments had just been part of a trend. Alwyn had done the things she had done and voiced the political opinions she'd voiced because all her friends were acting and talking the same way.

We were pretending, and everybody knew you didn't get hurt pretending.

I love having played Walter because I suppose any actor brings a certain aspect of their own personality to their work, and I had a fairly broad canvas to paint on with the different versions.

Walter is incredibly complex. I do a lot of thinking about the work I do, and try to get the rhythms of scenes.

When I was a teenager I loved acting, but I really just loved it for myself. I didn't like the fact that anyone else saw the work I was doing

It's always a great day going to work with Ginnifer Goodwin; she's a fantastic actress and I learn so much from her.

I actually had the good fortune to work with Nick Hoult on Mad Max in Africa, so we became really fast friends.

I love acting, every job is a dream job when you're an actor. I'd like to do eventually more film work and to collaborate with the best actors and directors in film.

John Hurt was incredible to work with.

I feel that doing theater does give you a good grounding to work on camera. The audience is the lens.