Quotes About Acting

Viola Davis is incredible - she's kind of the biggest career-wise inspiration for me. Brilliant actor, so intelligent, so strong. The path that she's made is incredible.

I would absolutely love to do something with Viola Davis or Meryl Streep. I just think both of those women fall so deep into their characters that you are no longer looking at the actresses, you are looking at the characters they embraced.

Crime and violence are the easiest emotions to reenact.

It's always difficult to play a scene of physical violence because you're always afraid that you don't know your own strength and might hurt someone.

I have no problem with violence, I have no problem playing horrible people.

It's so weird that I play this woman who pretty much deals with violence on a daily basis, and I'm such a wimp in who I am.

I like a twisted sense of humour. On 'A History of Violence,' David Cronenberg and I would be doing the grimmest scenes and laugh a lot.

'Vikings' has been so many different challenges, and some of that is, at times, you have to be big and imposing and violent and vicious, and then you have be pulled back and withdrawn and just more layers and more time to portray those layers, too.

In my first film, Five Corners, I played a very scary, violent crazed character, and it exposed me to a lot of directors.

I used to get some flack from my agents because I wouldn't even audition for parts where the hero uses violent force to be a hero.

The characters I've played have been mostly violent, and I'm so far from being violent or aggressive. I spend a lot of time watching 'Fireman Sam' with my three-year-old son Louis.

I have never been in a violent movie or television show.

I started playing violin when I was six, so I thought I could be a professional. It wasn't until I was 15 when I got into acting classes and realized this was what I wanted to do.

I was trained classically in violin and voice, which led to musical theater. Then I left the music scene to chase acting, which is when 'Neighbours' came along. It was a fantastic playground for actors, and the cast around me taught me a lot.

As a child, I studied violin. My sister, who's 10 years older, was the actress in the family. I was painfully shy.

I did five seasons of 'Baywatch,' and I did four seasons of 'VIP.' I've been around awhile.

In school, I was Martha in 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?' I loved that.

I would love to play Mary in 'Long Day's Journey Into Night' or 'Virginia Woolf' or a comedy - just, like, a slapstick comedy.

I've always looked to that play, 'Virginia Woolf,' for a cue - as far as any cue I might need as an actor for inspiration or as a writer.

I'm told I am over-choosy, and I shocked everybody by doing Jeffrey Archer. I did that to annoy everybody; sometimes, between Medea and Virginia Woolf, you can get punch-drunk.

I love finding things. I love digging around in the dirt. It's part of my Virgo. It's like acting, really. You're always searching around for something and finding little hidden treasures.

I've written virtually as long as I've acted, it wasn't a sudden transition. I acted in my first play when I was 16 and I wrote my first play when I was 17.

There isn't much improvisation in film - there's virtually none. The people that theoretically could be good at this in a theater situation don't necessarily do this in a film in a way that will work, because it's much broader on a stage.

Virtue is not photogenic, so I liked playing bad guys. But, whenever I played a bad guy, I tried to find something good in him, and that kept my contact with the audience.