Quotes About Actor

I never thought about being the first black actor to win, even though everybody else talked about that. If I stop to think as a black actor, people will see me differently. If I play as a black actor, people will only see that. I think my key was to perform as an actor, not as a black actor. And after winning the Cesar, I was an actor with a Cesar. there are many more adjectives to describe who I am. I'm not only black.

The biggest thing about me, as an actor, is I'm never a finished product, you know? I always want to try something or be in a new genre because, one, it's much more fun to do that because you're not doing the same thing over and over. One of the greatest reasons is that it keeps stretching you as an actor. So, hopefully, my method is that it makes me a better actor, and a more believable actor, so then, the more experience I have in any way possible, in a drama or a musical genre, different formats of working, the better I can be on all different platforms.

To be an actor and a director, I actually felt it helped me tremendously to be in the scenes of The Hollars, because as you can see, they're very intimate, very intense scenes. You don't want to break the actor's character and you don't want to break their momentum, so as the actor, I tried not to call cut as much as I could, and almost make it feel like a play, just set this environment where these amazing actors could do what they wanted to do.

I've always felt it's the directors purview to say what; it's the actor's purview to say how. It's not good for an actor to have the big picture in mind - it bollocks you up. An actor's purview is the tiny little... We measure our performance in seconds.

I don't consider myself an actor, for me it's employment. Like the actor who's a waiter a lot, I'm an actor when I'm not on tour, in that that's a job I can do.

Well, an actor is an actor is actor, to paraphrase someone or other and the opportunity to work, to have a steady engagement, certainly seemed like an appealing concept to me.

For an actor to be working at all is a kind of miracle, because most actors aren't. So it's just silly for a working actor to say, 'Oh, I don't care if anybody knows I'm gay' especially if you're a leading man. Personally, I wouldn't advise a gay leading man-type actor to come out.

You can't get an actor to do something that is beyond his range, so you have to be aware of the range of the actor and, if necessary, alter the part to suit the actor.

Harrison Ford is a great actor and he's and lovely man and a great father and all of these things, I got to just meet him as a person and someone I respect as an actor.I'd never seen any 'Indiana Jones' movies or 'Star Wars' movies. My husband made me watch the Indiana Jones trilogy, I just was like fanboy Comic-Con geeked out. It was amazing I didn't show up to set with a whip and a hat.

I think my family's watched me over the years in my career, in my pursuit of my career, and they've seen the challenges and the struggles that come with being an actor, with being a writer and a director, and the challenges of morphing my career in from just being an actor into a writer/director.

I watched a film with a very famous, great, great actor, I won't mention his name because everyone loves his memory, but I thought, "God he was acting a lot." Great actor, but nonstop acting. Wall to wall, fitted-carpet acting.

I think directing yourself is a monumental task. Just to self edit as an actor, you work for some directors who don't give you a lot of feedback so you have to do that. That's a difficult thing to do as an actor.

The most important definition of an actor, the job of the actor, is to serve the writer, not yourself. Way too many actors serve themselves.

I do think it's a very good way to describe what a great actor does. You're both acknowledging the authority of the director and the necessity of the actor to push back and find their own voice.

Claude Rains was what we call an actor's actor. He was very involved with himself and his performance.

It's natural for any actor that segues into directing to be an actor's director. You know how to relate to the actors.

The way an actor is trained doesn't ultimately have much bearing on my work. I'm interested in the actor as artist.

I have actor friends, but they're not famous. I feel like if you're an actor or - famous, you have to overly prove that you're a normal, cool person.

Some people manage to make that transition from child actor to adult actor seamlessly. But I felt that if I spent my whole life on a film set without taking a few years to do something else, all I would ever know about was film sets.

Kids kill a show! It's, like, a fun concept when the character is pregnant, but then if a show runs for a while, I'm sorry, but it gets annoying when it starts to talk. You get a child actor in there, and unless that child actor is freakin' awesome, it's going to be annoying.

I think directors can be a little insensitive to how vulnerable an actor is, when he's giving a performance. Part of the job of an actor is to invite scrutiny, but with that, the people around them have to nurture that and put them in an environment where they feel safe and they feel like they can risk something.

It is one of the few elements in the process that a director really, really can't control: an actor's performance. If you have a director that understands that, it's comforting to an actor. You're starting the relationship more as a collaborator, rather than as an employee or some kind of a soldier trying to execute something you don't organically feel.

I never wanted to be an actor. I never want to be an actor. I want to be a movie star. The whole idea of having to act is too gruesome. It's too ambitious for me.

I just always wanted to be an actor. I don't remember ever not wanting to be an actor. I did a lot of musical theater when I was younger, and I really hope to get back there someday.

Do what you want I don't care. That's the thing to say to an actor. Most people don't understand that. Not to manipulate them. That's what you say to an actor. You got a problem with the whole environment in doing that? Fine, what are we going to do to make the scene work? Now you have someone on your side. Now you have someone working with you.

You've got to do the big studio movies to get your name, but as an actor and for your own well-being you kind of need to step back from that occasionally and do the smaller films. In the end, that's what helps you learn and makes you a better actor.

Peter Sarsgaard, he's an extraordinary actor, and I would say that Peter has really brought into my life and my sister's life a sense of presence as an actor that I never really understood or knew about until I met him. They've been together for a very long time, and he introduced me to the idea of the presentation.

I don't want to take shots at professional actors, because obviously the great ones are great. But I do think that given the kind of stories I've been telling in my films, it's hard for me to imagine how professional actors would have done better. And it's easy for me to imagine how they would have done worse. Because I think a lot of what an actor is trained to do and a lot of what an actor's instincts point toward is clarification, is always making it clear what's happening in the story, how the character fits into the scene, what the character wants.

Once I hit 25, I realized I had to do more than just be an actor. I love acting, but there's something that makes it difficult to just be a man, a grownup. Not to take away from any actors, but I knew I wasn't going to be Tom Cruise. I knew I was a character actor, which is great and I'm proud of it. But I knew that I wanted to do more. I started producing and directing and writing and stuff for the theater, and then that grew out of hand and I sort of lost my control. I've always loved the process of filmmaking. Now I'm much more into producing docs, but I want to direct features.

I think by default I wanted to be an actor because, on a movie set as a little kid, the only thing that you can do is be an actor. And I was really enthralled by the whole process.

Even dramatically how you position some person, the depth, the existence [in 3D] is different than a flat image even though by itself it has depth, we create the illusion of depth. For example, some of the shots I have to stay closer to the actor because it's a young actor, I like it closer for some of the shots. I watch 2D scenes next to the camera, then when I go back to my station and watch it in 3D I have to go back and reduce his acting, he has to shrink a little bit because he peeks out more.

I grew up in an artistic family where everyone was doing something in one field of the arts or another. I was I think 12 years old when I did my first acting at the Actor's Studio and James Dean once said that the only reason to become and actor is because you have to. I think that you know from a young age if that is a certain rush that you're going to need to satisfy you and to make you feel fulfilled - and if you don't then you shouldn't do it. It's just too brutal of a business most of the time.

I had to learn how to become a real actor, I had to suffer and be rejected and face that 100 times just like every actor. It wasn't like someone handed it to me

But I've always felt that the less you know about an actor's personal life, the more you can get involved in the story in which he's playing a character. And I don't like to see movies where you know about everything that happens behind the scenes. I can't engage in the story if I know what's going on in the actor's head.

There's something really natural to me about being what they call in the business a "hyphenate." Being a musician-actor or writer-musician-actor.

It is easier to get an actor to be a cowboy than to get a cowboy to be an actor.

As Uta Hagen would say, there's the representational actor and the presentational actor. My sister [Maggie Gyllenhaal] came up to me recently after she saw this movie, Southpaw, the movie I did, and she thought there was this exploration of that type of presentation, and a bit of representation as well, if I could be totally honest, where she was deeply moved.

The critic is genius at one remove; he is not unlike an actor on the stage, and incarnates in his mind, as the actor embodies in his person, another's work; only thus does he understand art, realize it, know it; and having arrived at this, his task is done.

The only disadvantage to directing if you've been an actor is how self-conscious you are. When I'm directing, I'm always so aware when I'm speaking to an actor of how easily I could throw them off by saying something careless or not being clear or concise. So it does make you watch your words in a way that sometimes is unhelpful.

But I would like to think that it's the actor that makes the difference in these cases. Not the director, not the guy that wrote the book, not the guy that adapted it for the screen, but the actor.

Part of an actor's job is to actually adopt the world-view of the character she is playing and to tell the story from that vantage point. If an actor represses large aspects of their personality, they will have a severely limited range and castability. Great actors cultivate effortless access to their subpersonalities. Many acting teachers call this 'freeing your instrument.'

As an actor, I don't have any politics. As an actor, I'm driven more by an authentic - I would say an obsessive-compulsive-disorder level-fixation on mimicry, tonality of voice, to literally imitate something until I can just disappear into it.

I grew up on a set. The guys I hung around with were crew guys: the camera department, the prop guys. I was like the third kid through the door when I was a kid actor on Leave It To Beaver. I was always one of five guys who would have a couple lines. I was a journeymen actor in my first career, so I was appreciative of the journeymen on the set.

I think every actor tries to put a little bit of themselves into each character, and I think if you watch very closely, every actor has a bit of himself in every role whether they want to admit it or not.

Giving yourself over to the fine line of a human-like droid means that sometimes you make choices that don't make you feel good, as an actor, and you have to learn to embrace that. No actor will tell you that that's a good place to be.

For me, I'm not in an industry where I'm starving. I'm so lucky to have this job, I'm compensated for my work in an incredible way. But what I do ask is when I join a production I want to make sure that the male actor isn't making four times my salary, which has been true, or seven times my salary. And if that's true you go, you know what, I don't need this job. It's not really asking for more - it's asking for something that is respectable and equal to the male actor and you have to go, why are women being valued less?

The way I see it, when I go out as an actor, it should be on a type of film I'm never going to do as a director.

Some actors might just do one thing, and another actor does another thing. I do an awful lot of preparation with the script, really. What I do is repeat the script, over and over and over again. Through that, it's almost like it seeps into my enamel. I'm reading all the characters, as well as my own. That is where the bulk of my preparation goes into.