One of the best things about being an actor is that it's a meritocracy.
Everything I learned I learned from the movies.
I like actors who, when you see them on screen, you sense a person, not just an actor.
My main goal as an actor, with my craft or whatever poncy way you want to say it, is to always take the audience with me. To make them feel for me, or to make them hate me, I want a reaction. I want their emotions. The worst reaction someone can have is, "eh."
In the courtroom, it's where a lawyer really becomes an actor. There's a very fine line between delivering a monologue in a play and delivering a monologue to a jury. I've always felt that way - I've been in a lot of courtrooms. The best lawyers are really theatrical.
We are not what we seem. We are more than what we seem. The actor knows that. And because the actor knows that hidden inside himself there's a wizard and a king, he also knows that when he's playing himself in his daily life, he's playing a part, he's performing, just as he's performing when he plays a part on stage.
As an actor, you need that constant change, or things will get stale.
We have the Terminator as governor, and we had an actor as president, so why shouldn't we have a fashion designer as a senator?
What I find sometimes that is tricky is if actors are using too much of their own life in a picture, in a scene, they get locked into a particular way to play the scene, and it lacks an immediacy.
Actors and magicians are both performers and they represent things that are not necessarily who they are.
I am not born to just become an actor
I always wanted to be an actor, but I was always fighting it. It never seemed that honorable to me, and I guess I was always afraid that I might fail.
Filmmaking for me is always aiming for the imaginary movie and never achieving it.
The role of an actor is to make every character believable.
Ninety per cent of how you learn is watching great people. When you are surrounded by good actors it lifts your performance.
Actors cannot work against each other. It's totally impossible.
A lot of actors get concerned about their own image, even going so far as to rewrite a movie to best serve that image. All I want to do is be in good movies.
Most writers write haphazardly. The actor is fighting unjustified words all the time.
I have a sneaking suspicion that if there were a way to make movies without actors, George Lucas would do it.
If a scene isn't well written they'll drop your neckline to fill the void.
I can remember when nobody believed an actor and didn't care what he believed.
I am very much a seat-of-the-pants actor. I will prepare when I have to. But I like being unprepared.
I never dreamed of being an actor, but I'm beginning to love it more and more because I like challenging myself. When I feel like I'm not learning or having fun anymore, then I'll stop.
Being an actor is such a humiliating experience because you are selling yourself to the public, your face, your personality, and that is humiliating. As you get older, it becomes more humiliating because you've got less to sell.
My biggest fear as an actor is being involved in something mediocre, or being mediocre myself.
