A Quote by Holly Hunter
As an actor, I always like some tension, some distance, between me and the character I'm playing.
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The secret at the heart of 'The Memory Keeper's Daughter' is something everybody, except for some of the characters, knows in Chapter 1. Some of the narrative tension comes from that distance between what the readers know and what the characters know.
Becoming the character you are playing might work for some, but for me, it doesn't. I always maintain a gap between myself and my character because if I will go so deep into it, it will get difficult for me to come back. You should work towards understanding the psyche of your character and then play it.
I've always been interested in the tension between knowledge and mystery, between science and religion, and the various ways we cope with the unknown. Some of those are productive; some can be attempts to pin down things that are by nature impossible to know.
I envy people that have separate lives - that their job is one thing, their personal life is another. I've never been able to have that going on for me. I always try and keep some distance. I mean you can never give everything, so there is some distance, but it's pretty raw on some levels.
It's like, sometimes I'll watch a movie, and it's got some big star in it playing a working-class person, and the character is in a grocery store, and you can kind of tell, from just watching the scene, that this actor doesn't do their own shopping. So you have to have some sense of reality.
Some of my friends said I wouldn't have a future in football, as did some of my family, but I still believed in the potential I had. My mum would tell me I needed to get a proper job, but for me, I didn't want to be anything other than a footballer. That led to some tension and frustration between us.
With most good scripts and good shows, they expect the actor to bring some of their ideas to the backstory of the character. It's always a good collaboration between the actor and the writer and the director to try stuff out during the process.
Sometimes I'll watch a movie, and it's got some big star in it playing a working-class person, and the character is in a grocery store, and you can kind of tell, from just watching the scene, that this actor doesn't do their own shopping. So you have to have some sense of reality.
Well, you put a little piece of yourself into every character that you do. Even if you're playing some psychotic person, which of course I'm not, some part of you is in that character and it's hopefully believable. I always come back to the fact that my own instinct is better than something I build in my mind.
I see myself as a character actor, and I've always been drawn to playing characters that are different from myself because acting is escapism for me. I've never been that comfortable playing people that are like me.
I feel like for me to write songs that I would be interested in as a listener, there has to be tension, and there has to be some kind of push and pull between reality and the potential of disaster.
The ability to stretch my range into all genres and characters is something I take great pleasure in doing. I thoroughly enjoy it. I consider myself a character actor, though some think of me as a leading man. As an actor, I love shifting gears from character to character, and the more range I can expand, the better.
I've said this before, but I've always felt more comfortable playing the guy who thinks he's the hot shot or thinks he's the greatest and is so far from it, you know? The misguided character. That's always more interesting to me - especially with a comedy. I've always felt inside more like a character actor.
For me as an actor, you always sort of want to bring yourself to a character in some way. You want to find a way to approach something in a way that's real and interesting, and also so there's some empathy there.
You can be playing a line some way and the director wants you to change that, or you can disagree. But I always think that the creative conversation between director and actor is what leads to good work.
Most guys I know are assholes. I have some great asshole friends, but that's not the point. Friendship has got nothing to do with that. It's can you hang, can you talk about this without any feeling of distance between you? Friendship is the diminishing of distance between people. That's what friendship is, and to me it's one of the most important things in the world.
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