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.

Modern acting is method acting, most of it. And there are sort of different schools, so I guess I'm not really from one school or another. I had a number of different teachers but they were all kind of drawing from the same pool, which is - What do you want? What are you doing to get what you want? And, what is in the way? These are basic acting questions. Knowing the answers to those questions. So you're talking about objectives and actions and obstacles. That's a sort of shorthand that gives you a language.

I used to be a bit obsessed by acting but not anymore. I do enjoy acting but I probably enjoy it more now because it's easier. I can't work in the theater because to me it's too serious. It's like being in prison for me. I admire people that can do that but I can't do it. I'd rather live my life and do a bit of acting in between.

I was new to acting on a stage in a narrative as opposed to acting on a stage as a stand-up. And like everything else it's just like comfort level. The first time I did stand-up I was at a place called the B3 in New York on Third and Avenue B and I not only didn't take the mic out of the stand, but I clutched the stand of the entire time.

My first real kiss came when I was 10, and it was in an acting class. I had to do a scene from a movie where someone gets kissed under a tree, and I did not want to do it! But my acting partner wanted me to feel comfortable, so he bought a picnic basket with all these snacks. He made such an effort - and it was cute.

I was attached to star in a project that was going to be an unbelievable character piece, to be showcased all over the world. It was everything I had been working toward and had suffered for. I had two months to prep and pretty much bankrupted myself in the process. A week before I was supposed to get on the plane, the whole project fell apart. Not only did it leave me completely broke and out of work, but I felt as if I had been betrayed by acting. Acting is not just something I love but a part of who I am. I was shattered. Thankfully, the love of those around me helped push me forward.

Acting is the only thing I'm even vaguely good at and acting is something that I think I do know about.

Basically, the prosecutor who led case against me and that administration were trying to say that an actor can be held responsible for his acting, thousands of miles away from where he did the acting. The analogy would be if an artist painted a nude painting in New York City, and it was met with accolades and great reviews. And suddenly, somebody from Texas bought it and put it in their shoe store and it was found to be obscene in Texas, the artist in New York is responsible, and goes to jail because it's obscene in Texas.

I really just enjoy listening to talk [to John Hurt and Charlotte Rampling]... not even about acting or anything. It's interesting because I felt really connected to all these people very easily. They're all very open emotionally, like we're in the scene together, so you never feel like anyone's acting.

People acting together as a group can accomplish things which no individual acting alone could ever hope to bring about.

I’ve learned in a hundred ways that I rarely regretted acting but often regretted NOT acting fast enough.

What I do is I don't act a part, I give a piece of myself. Old friends that have known me for a long time, when they saw me in my first movie said: "Roland you are not acting; you are just being yourself." But I don't think you can deliver a role without putting something of yourself into it, and I just realised that everyday we do a little bit of acting.

When I started studying acting in New York, I didn't plan to be an action hero. I just wanted to learn acting because I felt it was something I needed to try to do for myself, to express something, my inner pain, or something I couldn't get out.

I got into acting because I wanted to act and I love acting. That's my true north: to be creative and to be challenged in what I love to do.

If you're acting, then there's a prescribed way to behave; whereas in life there's no prescribed way. So acting feels like a comfortable way to get through the day.

I'm a geeky actor, in the way that I like the craft of acting. I trained as a stage actor and was given a lot of technical tools to play with. I like the craft of acting. It sounds geeky when I say it, but it's true.

I'm still insecure, but when I first started acting, I was really insecure. I glared at a lot of people. I assumed everyone hated me. Somehow that scowl has turned into an acting career.

That to me is what my idea of film acting should be. There shouldn't be any acting. You should just be watching a real person.

Most people assume because I'm an actor that's all I know about and care about, I'm actually a camera geek and a film geek. I grew up making short films the same time I was acting. For me, it's a motion picture, not a play. I'm just as interested in what the camera department is doing and world building through costume design and production design as I am in acting. I think all good directors do that whether they're an actor or not.

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.

The foundation for film acting is stage acting.

In fact you can begin to discover and investigate whether you are an actor or not, whether you're in my view, qualified for a life in this profession or in this endeavor by checking yourself out and acting every day, getting plays and scripts and getting together with people and divvying up the parts and acting in one way or another, or writing things.

I love acting in the theater,but I'm fascinated with acting on film. If it's a film or a play or whatever, if the writing is good and you really feel passionate about it, you just can't lose. You'll grow from it. Whether it's a success or not is neither here nor there; you're going to grow as an artist from this experience.

I have an appreciation for what some people would call "bad acting," but which I think can be much more real than the overly emotive, technical and supposedly "realistic" acting that is so prevalent in mainstream cinema.

I didn't know anything about acting, much less about acting in a comedy.

I read all the books on Fairfax in the British Library, did a lot of horse riding and studied military tactics of the time, finding out that he actually laid his rose garden out in strategic formations! But Method acting is a label I don't really understand, because there's a method to everybody's acting. In terms of jumping into a character's skin, I try to immerse myself in the role as much as possible to bring me closer to them. All I do is what's required to achieve what I want to achieve.

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.

Ive had plenty of lessons about film acting and theatre acting.

Let's be honest: Ignoring is acting, and nothing more — acting as though the words or actions of your oppressors don't hurt. You hear the words, you feel the insults, and you bear the blows.

What I really like is the marriage of both [writing and acting] - for instance, with Postcards. I don't actually act in it, but I worked on it with Mike [Nichols] as I went along, creating the character, so it was a bit like acting for me.

The trick to acting is not to show off; it's to think the thoughts of the character. I was lucky because when I started acting, it was doing jobs above pubs. I learned to act in anonymity, so by the time people saw me, I knew what I was doing. I was crap for years, but no one saw me being crap. It's a trade you learn.

When I'm acting I don't sing, and when I'm recording I'm not 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.

Acting is about listening and reacting. John Wayne was right: Acting is just reacting. You don't have to do much - as long as you stay out of the way of others. That's why it works.

It's an acting job - acting natural.

It was just expected that I would go to college. Both my parents are teachers and they tolerated acting, but I was going to go to a school of quality or bust. Which made my downshifting back to acting afterward a little difficult.

It dawned on me that acting was what I wanted to do with my life. Nothing had ever touched my heart like acting did.

A lot of people don't realize, when you are acting in a martial arts film, you're not just performing martial arts. You're not just performing martial arts. You're actually acting as much as any other actor.

Acting for me, is a passion, but it's also a job, and I've always approached it as such. I have a certain manual-laborist view of acting. There's no shame in taking a film because you need some money.

Acting for me is not a bad habit like smoking that I must make an effort to quit. I love acting; I love directing.

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

When I say that the acting is sort of like a normal acting experience, I'm just talking about the interacting in actual scenes, like doing dialogue.

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.

There is one scene where he is kissing up my back. It is really sexy and I didn't know he was going to do it. He started doing it and in the film you see me saying, whew, and that wasn't acting, that was really me thinking, whew, oh my goodness Daniel Craig is kissing my back! I really did. I had to stop and remind myself that I was playing a character and I was acting in a film.

I think it almost all has to do with coming at writing from an acting perspective, because I didn't, like, study writing. I studied acting.

I really need to work. People think that I'm no longer interested in acting and only interested in work-ing with the animals. Obviously I have given that impression, but it is not how I feel. I think I'm a good actor. I think I look OK. I don't understand why I'm not working all the time.

You know what, I'm very interested in acting, but right now I'm busy promoting my album and going on tour because that's my first love, but I'm very interested in doing some parts that may come my way. I've been offered a few movie parts so far, but I have to really concentrate on singing. But it's something I'm interested in doing eventually. I haven't been offered a part that truly inspires me to take time off, though.