Quotes About Acting

I went to theater school, and if I spent time with one school of thought in this whole acting game, it's the Meisner approach of improvise-based acting. This does not mean that you improvise your acting, but that you focus on the other person.

History is basically really looking back and finding out what happened to an individual, a community, a family, a group in a certain event. And so that's why I go, "Wow. That's what acting really is. You find out the background, you get the joy of creating a fictional history of a fictional character and you get to tell a story." So I felt that acting is making history come alive and it became my mode of trying to figure out what this craft of acting is really all about.

I find any sort of acting that doesn't have any humor in it is mind-numbingly boring. 'Serious acting' is the kind of acting that I don't ever respond to.

If you feel afraid, you can make yourself courageous by acting courageous. If you are feeling unhappy, by deliberately acting happy you can induce happy feeling. If you are lacking in enthusiasm, by simply acting enthusiastic you can make yourself enthusiastic.

Perhaps we could push beyond these legalistic gender roles if we spent less time worrying about “acting like men” and “acting like women,” and more time acting like Jesus.

Acting is many things. Acting is playing lines, of course, but it's much more profound than that. Acting is truth-telling, and trying to find the truth in a human situation, which will be sketched out by a screenwriter with all the skill that a screenwriter can do; but in the end, that's just the map of the journey. The actor's job is to divine and embody the truth, and find it.

I wasn't really driven to be an actor or anything, but in college I decided to study acting, much to my parents' disappointment. I attended Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers where Bill Esper was, and that is where I really got hooked on the art of acting, and, almost, the chemistry of acting.

With acting, I think half of it is just acting confident. We stand on these red carpets and pose in these dresses, but we're all only so confident. It doesn't mean we think we're great looking or anything. It's all a façade.

When you're studying drama, when you're a young actor, there are simple rules about acting. "Why am I here? What prevents me from leaving? What am I trying to get? How do I hide something?" So when you're making a film like Abel's movie, you want to be thinking about those things all the time. And you wanna be armed with those things, and you hope the other actors you're working with have the same understanding of drama and scene and acting. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't.

I'm really interested in the minutiae of different tones and what that explains - how people's backgrounds are reflected in minute details of how they interact. It's true that I'm hypersensitive to all that. Writing is acting in the sense that you're imagining and inhabiting another. In the book I was trying to get at the root of what true acting is.

I know what it's like to have a dream. I know what it's like to roll the dice and say, 'I'm going to go after this thing,' and nothing turns my stomach quicker than acting teachers or acting schools that look at a bunch of dreamers and say, 'We can help,' when they know full well that they can't.

Good acting should be invisible. You shouldn't be aware of the acting. It should feel real.

I decided to not be so dismissive of my music in favor of my acting. Acting has been such a consistent thing for me; a lot of times in the past, I wouldn't have had the confidence with my music to really make it a part of my schedule. I would easily push it to the side, or I would easily take up time that was needed for it. I'm not that way anymore. Now, I really want to make everything work. I want to continue to do both at the highest level that I can.

That's the one thing that's funny about going from modeling to acting. In modeling, you're supposed to think about what you look like all the time. When you're in front of the camera, if you're not considering that, God knows what the pictures will look like. With acting, you have to completely forget it.

I enrolled in an acting workshop and my first acting role was on the TV soap opera 'Melrose Place.'

I would rather miss the mark acting well than win the day acting basely.

Confidence. That's huge as an actor. Confidence can get you a long way. Maybe it's a cultural thing, being Korean, but my first reflex has always been to exude humility - but it doesn't help you in acting. For acting, humility isn't the best thing. It'll weaken your work. So it's a head game for me. "Can I really be confident in knowing my skill set is down? Can I perform like I own this role?"

Acting for me was an escape and it wasn't until Smoke Signals that made me realize that acting is a personal development and challenge to grow. Smoke Signals really mirrored the way I grew up and how I felt, and that movie was the first time I'd dealt with my parents' death and how I felt that loss and sadness and anger. After that movie I said, "Y'know what, I have to realistically wear my emotions now when I do a job. That's gotta be as real as it gets. It's not just dialogue anymore."

You know, you're just sitting with him [Chevy Chase], then you're doing a scene with him and acting, and all of a sudden you go, "Omigod, that's Chevy Chase!" And then you've got to keep acting. "Danny, your lines? Your lines...? You've got to keep going!" "Oh, sorry, sorry!"

I started acting when I was about nine. I always wanted to get into acting since I was really little but my parents would never let me because they'd heard all the bad stuff about being in the business as a young actor and stuff like that.

I love acting. When I'm acting I feel like I'm on vacation. I'm just having a wonderful time. The nightmare is just getting the work to happen.

Acting is interesting because you get to be involved in different stories and get to work with different people. Also, acting allows one to be a part of different stories, travel to different parts of the country and all the experiences put together make life interesting.

I'm giving up acting. . . . I'm 66 and there are a number of celebrations I've got to get down on paper, and acting doesn't allow me to do that. It was a hell of a drug, performance. It's a great thrill, especially for a storyteller. But it can go. Directing can go. Writing can't go. And in terms of what lies ahead, I want to have a burning focus - almost like smoke coming up from the paper as I write.

We learned out craft. Acting is a craft and you must learn it. I see a lot of talent today in the kids but they don't know how to work. They don't know the craft of acting and you can only get that on the stage in theater. You cannot learn how to act in movies or in television.

We [musicians] are comfortable in front of the camera doing music videos, and it's almost a form of acting when we're doing music videos. We're acting out our own thoughts and what we've written down on paper.

I loved getting classical training in terms of acting. I would've stayed in acting school for the rest of my life if I could have. It was this amazing period of my life where everything was so safe.

I've always held to the belief, though, that people who do too much acting training always look like they're acting, you know?

The first acting I ever did was an Italian commercial. Once I did that, I said, 'this acting thing is awesome.'

Baseball player. Yeah, that was my dream before acting, or alongside acting.

Once I moved to Chicago and started trying to get acting jobs, I just tended to book more things that were comedically based than anything else. I never had the preconceived notion, "I will be a comedic actor." I just thought, "I'll go into acting and see what kind of work I can get."

I love acting. I love play-acting. I love pretending. I love telling stories so whether they be comedic or serious or whatever, it doesn't really matter to me. I enjoy telling a good story. I have it all in me.

Acting didn't solve much! If it did, I would have ended up much less crazy than I am today, but I'm not. At least for me, acting is a relief - a relief to be able to admit certain things about myself and disguise in my work, in my characters.

I know that if I'd had to go and take an exam for acting, I wouldn't have got anywhere. You don't take exams for acting, you take your courage.

As much as I love acting and I hope to be doing it for a long time, it almost feels more natural for me to be a producer. I came into all of this because I'm a fan of movies and I wanted to find any way I could to be a part of it all. I happened to take the acting route but it could have been a million different ways in. Now that I'm producing it's just really fun for me to work with people that I really admire and put people together who I think will work well together. Just having a little more control.

I had a great acting teacher in high school. But I didnt like acting because it took too many people to get the job done. You have to talk to too many people and listen to others opinions. With music, you get a few friends together and just make it.

I think that I burnt myself out a little bit with my dancing because I did so much of it. I was exhausted so thought that I would try a different kind of performance and expression and acting seemed like a close fit; it was similar in some ways to dancing. My mum showed me some really good films and so I became interested in films and acting.

I started acting long before I decided to pursue it. I started acting as an amateur when I was a kid, but I wanted to become a diplomat. It was self-centered and weird, but I had this idea of going out in the world and solving conflicts and making the world a better place.

I never was disillusioned with acting because I love acting.

I started acting when I was 5, and it was always a part of my life. My life and acting weren't separate things; they were always one.

I am very happy acting, and just have never gone at, or been bitten by the directing bug to the extent where I'm willing to put acting aside. If offered the opportunity, I think I could do a good job with the right material.

I've learned that I can't do it all at once. So, you have to figure out your angle of attack. Coming in on the acting front, acting is a passion of mine. It's a true love. Dancing, I kind of just fell into. Choreographing, the same thing. But making films, producing and directing, that's the heartbeat of my existence.

If I do a scene with an actor who doesn't have much experience, I say, 'I tell you what we're going to do: You just listen to me, and then you respond. We don't have to do any acting.' And that's good advice because you shouldn't see the acting.

Singing was my first love and I never even considered it after I started acting, but now I'm bringing it back into my life. I trained from the ages of 11 to 17. When I moved to New York and got into serious acting, I just kind of abandoned the whole singing thing. But when I grew up in Pennsylvania I went to voice lessons once a week.

Acting is somewhat mysteriously taught. There are so many different methods and systems and processes for teaching acting because it will always be an elusive art-form.

I love acting. But I love being a mother. To be a full mother and a full person, you have to do what you love, and that's acting. But I like the best of both worlds.

You develop courage by acting courageously whenever you feel like acting otherwise.

My very first acting job was with Alan Parker on' Angela's Ashes,' but as a child, I had written to so many other productions just applying for any role. I always wanted to be an actress, and I did loads of acting summer schools.

For the camera, I like the feeling of changing into different characters. Even though I'm not acting, I still have to be someone different to show the product. If I'm not being someone different, I won't find it fun. I love the shows because it transforms you into a different person. Not Malaika - it makes me someone else. Naturally, I'm quiet and crazy. But when they give me an outfit, like a very elegant outfit, it transforms me into this beautiful woman - I can feel it inside me. I like that, playing different characters. I'm really interested in acting.