A lot of the stuff you do as an actor - or I do, because I can't speak for everyone - is not always consciously thought out. A lot of the time, for me, it's actually just feeling stuff, and it happens all in the moment and your body reacts.
Writers can get very angry when an actor says, "I don't know, I don't feel very comfortable with this line." Sometimes though, you're working with a writer for whom that is simply not apt - like Harold Pinter.
I certainly think that he [Alan Rickman] was a kind of actor who needed to grow into his maturity to realize the potential, the huge potential that he had.
I have done film, television and theatre - all at a pretty substantial level - I don't think it's possible for American actors to do that.
If I was just considered a looker and wasn't considered an actor, where would I be in 10 or 20 years from now?
There's no way, of course, to fully understand what an illness does to someone or what emotional state or physical state it puts you in, but to show respect, yeah, definitely I've had a chance to talk to many people that - it wasn't really a specific illness that quote-unquote, I researched, and as I said, if I was a good actor I would have done that. But you know, I just wanted to pay respect without putting too much into it.
There was no actually stock footage in "Medium Cool." I wrote the script. I wrote the riots. And I integrated the actors in the film in the park during the demonstrations. But nowhere was it like we had stock footage and then later, in editing, integrated it into the film. It was all done at the time.
It's always a pleasure to see John. I'm fond of telling people that when I was a young actor in NY and had no work ,no money, you know the story because you're heard it before.
Well, I always looked at Mulan as a movie about a lesbian coming out.
An actors most important responsibility is to know lines well.
I can now shed the child-actor thing, like the fat, and start a new career, because no one sees me as Dudley.
Peter Mullan is the least method actor around.
Singers, like Frank Sinatra and myself, we interpret the songs that we like. Not unlike a Shakespearean actor that goes back to the greatest words ever written, we go back to the greatest songs and bring about my interpretation of them.
I'm called a folk singer, and I'm not too sure about that. I went about my life approaching music not from the point of view of a singer, but from the point of view of an actor. That's how I first started to sing.
[ Chadwick Boseman] is a remarkable actor, and he's a remarkable person.
I just like watching people who really are not self-conscious, who aren't aware, because I fear that one could become too self-conscious, too artful, as an actor. Sometimes if you look at somebody, you can extrapolate from their exterior what might be happening in their interior. I'm nosy.
At a certain point, you have to convince the actors that you've done the right thing. The way I work, if I can't convince them, I've got to move on. I can't coerce them or browbeat them.
I've got to find a compromise where I don't feel compromised. I've got to find something equally good that they don't feel uncomfortable with. At a certain point, it's no longer about what I thought was right, but it's about this new discovery that happens with the actors. It's nice when the actor is also a writer.
When someone's an actor and you're an actor, you meet them and you feel like you know them. We're in the same business, and we all speak the same comedy language.
You want to be on your toes; You don't want to be in a Nic Cage movie and just have him blow by you as an actor.
In contrast to the inorganic thereness of lifeless matter, living beings are not mere appearances. To be alive means to be possessed by an urge toward self-display which answers the fact of one’s own appearingness. Living things make their appearance like actors on a stage set for them.
That's a true actor's nightmare: "Improvise in British sign language. Go."
Even trying it as an actor, I never thought I'd actually make it.
I think I'm a pretty cliché actor in that I hate watching myself on film. I don't know why it should be humbling to see yourself on film.
I'm a pretty cliché actor in that I hate watching myself on film.
