Acting Quotes - Page 96

I went through a period of pulling away from everything - acting, people - not sure if I would ever have a voice in this business.

I came to my mom and told her I wanted to do this[acting].

Yeah, I had actually tried to stop acting before I made Dead Man Walking.

The thing that's very close in the process is writing and acting, not directing. Directing's very different.

It's like a Master Class in Acting for three hours. I go to work and I learn so much and do so much. I'm privileged. I'm privileged to be on stage with them. That's all I can say. They're extremely generous. There are no egos in the room at all.

Every movie is different. Sometimes with movies, there are roles you should just leave alone and relax with and keep it light. And there are other ones where you want to work with an acting coach and really delve in there.

The third season of the Leftovers came along and Damon Lindelof sent me the script to Episode 3, and I called him up and thanked him for one of the greatest gifts I've been given. I had that script for almost two months, in the mountains in Idaho, before I even got on a plane and flew to Australia and went to the outback. He also told me to learn about the indigenous people in Australia and learn how to play a didgeridoo. It was just great. It was probably, in many ways, the best acting experience I've ever had.

What I didn't realize about television was that's true of acting, as well. You have that space of time to develop who you are, and you can use more and more of yourself. The lines between that character that I'm playing and myself become more and more blurred and, after awhile, they just disappear, altogether.

That one long scene in the Leftovers I have with David Gulpilil was seven pages long. When we finished it, Mimi Leder said, "I thought you were gonna do this in bits and pieces. You just did the whole thing." And I literally couldn't remember the scene. It wasn't that I was in a trance. I said, "Just keep shooting takes until you see what you want." In 48 years of acting, which is also how long I've been married, that had never happened to me.

There's the acting side of it so you work with a coach. Dissect a script. If it's a character, then obviously a character study. Just depends on if there is training needed.

If you love acting and you've ever experienced theater, then you know that in a movie it's almost impossible to live out that experience, unless you're a Pacino or a De Niro or somebody who gets to pick their parts.

The longer you are in acting business, the more you cherish the times when you're working with people that do great work, and can figure out how to enjoy themselves while they're doing the great work.

I went into show business because I love to work with people, and what I enjoy most about acting is rehearsing and getting to know people and their talents, forming relationships. Working in this business, barriers drop and you get into people real quickly

The reason why most of actors got into acting was so that we could become other people and have fun with being somebody else.

When I'm on an adult set and I'm in a scene, I am myself. I'm not acting. I am playing to the camera, definitely, but I am myself.

When I came out to L. A., I got a part in an episode of 'Star Trek: Voyager,' and I hired an acting coach.

I don't really like 'acting' - I like things to feel as natural as possible.

Acting is something that I've done since I was so young. I always felt - certainly as a teenager - really cynical about acting. I definitely didn't feel like it was something I wanted to do, and so I really took it for granted.

It's not that I'm using my life to put on screen or in my acting, it's that, when you're living in the world, you're exposed to stories, to people, to things that feel foreign and unfamiliar. And I'm curious about those things, me personally.

... actors of the first water are not more plentiful than playwrights of genius.

I approach my work with a passionate intensity, acting as if its success depends entirely on me. "But once I've done my best, I try to let go as much as possible and have no expectations about how my work will be received by the world."

Honestly, acting is the most work when you're unemployed. For me, the actual acting part is never hard. It's the politics and basically everything around the acting that is difficult.

Great acting may be a turn-on, but it won't make me fantasize about the person for a week.

To me, the producing falls into the same as acting. It requires so much time out of your life, and I take it very personally, I realize, so if I do something, it just has to be something I love and I don't want anyone else to do.

To me, the producing falls into the same as acting. It requires so much time out of your life, and I take it very personally, I realize. So if I do something, it just has to be something I love and I don't want anyone else to do. When I open projects, maybe something will appeal to me. I think I'm not opening them because I don't want anything to appeal to me right now.