Quotes on Actors

The only thing we are as actors are messengers. That's all we are. Correct? We are delivering the playwright's intention through the concept of the director. And I come on stage; if I feel confident in the role, then I give it away.

An actor must interpret life, and in order to do so he must be willing to accept all experiences that life can offer.

I think there are advantages to different scales of filmmaking. You wouldn't want to do just one thing.

I remember a conversation with my parents about who the people on the TV were, and learning they were actors and they acted out this story and just thinking that was the most fantastic notion, and that's what I want to do.

As a viewer, the minute I start getting confused, I check out of the movie. Emotionally, I'm severed.

Film has to be reflecting the world that we live in, and that's all you want to be a part of. Actors inhabit the same planet as everyone else. It's a weird thing that happens when you're an actor because people hold you up because you somehow embody in parts groups of people or people's hopes or something.

As an actor I am always waiting for my luck to run out.

Eyeing the traffic circulating the lobby hung with bad art. Big invasive stuff unloaded on Stanley Bard in exchange for rent. The hotel is an energetic, desperate haven for scores of gifted hustling children from every rung of the ladder. Guitar bums and stoned-out beauties in Victorian dresses. Junkie poets, playwrights, broke-down filmmakers, and French actors. Everybody passing through here is somebody, if not in the outside world.

You know, young actors say all the time, 'Should I use my own life experience?' And my response is, 'What choice do you have?'

On the whole, actors shout when they don't know what they're doing, trying to make an impact.

When the script is finished, and you're sitting around at a table read, and all the actors are reading the words that you've written, and you're hearing it out loud for the first time, that is always, every single time, no matter what, a magical process.

A lot of comic actors derive their main force from childish behavior. Most great comics are doing such silly things; you'd say, 'That's what a child would do.

A movie camera is like having someone you have a crush on watching you from afar - you pretend it's not there.

Acting is not about being someone different. It's finding the similarity in what is apparently different, then finding myself in there.

Actors are always afraid of ending up like overcooked old soup over time. What's risky is that you don't realize this has happened, and you just get thick and boring. Going abroad was like getting a new pot to cook everything again. I was a rookie, a new self. And they were asking me, 'Who are you?'

Actors search for rejection. If they don't get it they reject themselves.

I do know there are a lot of people who seem to be in my corner, and that's, of course, wonderful. I'm really more interested in the nomination than in the award, because I think the nomination just puts you within a group of outstanding actors.

My view of actors is that basically they're all harmless lunatics who'd be on the psychiatrist's couch, except that we get this sort of catharsis every six months or so, and we go and be absolutely someone else.

Botox should be banned for actors, as steroids are for sportsmen. Acting is all about expression; why would you want to iron out a frown?

I like young actors because they're so unspoiled, not like some of those actors who are about half an hour into their fifteen minutes of fame by the time they get to me.

[on BBC's Sherlock] It's a rare challenge, both for the audience and an actor, to take part in something with this level of intelligence and wit. You have to really enjoy it. It's a form of mental and physical gymnastics.