There were time when I was into method acting that I did have moments of residual character emotions, because the method bases your emotional responses as a character on emotional experiences from your real life.
There is nothing, not a thing, like the process of creating a character for the stage - you can't get it anywhere else. Unless you're totally method and spend six months living your life like your character for a film, the theater is the place to get that intense acting experience.
It's all about creating a back story for the character and developing emotional responses that are true to life in relation to the character. It isn't necessary to live a tragic life to create from that place.
There are elements of myself in every character I do, just because you take from your real life experiences and sprinkle those into your character.
Can you explore real issues as a fake character? Yes - it's called acting. Or fiction. But acting is not a method of engaging with the actual world, just as pretending to know what a character might eat does not a novel make - much less make that make-believe real.
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.
I don't have any particular method, my approach is very simple. I try to understand the emotional graph of the character.
When I'm writing, I try to have the mask of my character on as I'm walking through the world. When I'm not at my desk, the rest of the time, I try to stay in that character and see the world the way that character would It's almost like method acting in a way — keeping the character close the way the actor keeps a script close and always tries to be in character.
I am proud to say I'm a director's composer. People do method acting, I do method composing. I like to get into the skin of the character and go deep into the director's vision.
When you remain angry with another person, you give away your emotional control to that person each time you think of him or here. You allow him or her to control your emotions at long distance. By not forgiving, you allow that person to run your emotional life, exactly as if he or she were right there with you and the situation was occurring all over again.
With big, emotional roles it's very easy, especially if you've grown up in the American school of acting, to exploit your own pain. You have to be careful about that, because 9 times out of 10, your pain is not appropriate to the character.
I've always done method acting. I'm a method actor, and I've done that for years. I never did acting and decided to take it seriously because all the parts people want me to do were playing the pretty role. If I want to play someone pretty, I'll play myself.
I believe in method acting. Whenever I'm working on a character, I start behaving like him. I start doing these things which the character would normally do. Maybe that's the way I function as an actor, and I believe in it. And that's how I try and portray a character.
I had no idea what I was signing up for. I auditioned for some random character. I knew the sides were fake, but what they were trying to capture was an emotional toughness and a woundedness. I knew I liked the character. I didn't know who the character was, but I liked the spirit of the character.
I was raised in New York City and raised in the New York City theater world. My father was a theater director and an acting teacher, and it was not uncommon for me to have long discussions about the method and what the various different processes were to finding a character and exploring character and realizing that character.
I consider myself a method singer, not a method actor. I applied method acting to singing.
I've never been a method actress; I've never been that person that wants to imagine horrible things happening in your own life in order to exploit them for your emotional being in the movie. I'm just not good at doing that.