A Quote by Jennifer Coolidge
I don't know what I am. I guess you can call me a character actor in the sense that I'll never be an ingenue. You know, that's over. My shot was missed. I take a normal person and make them more of a character. I don't know what that would be called.
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Whether or not I am a 'character actor' or any other kind of actor, I really don't know. When people call me a 'character actor,' I fail to understand what it means.
You get to know a character that you play on-stage in a pretty profound way over a length of time. I don't want to sound highfalutin and say you become the character, you just start bringing more and more of yourself to the part until the character and actor, it's hard to tell them apart. It's some weird amalgam. In film, because of the period of time, I don't know that you ever get that deep into it.
For me, personally, I'm more comfortable with what I would call third-person entertainment, meaning watching a character that's explicitly not me and experiencing something through a character's eyes, than what I would call first-person entertainment, which is a video game in which I am the character.
If you're playing a fictional character, you can create a character, you can sort of take certain liberties. And when you're playing a real person who's actually standing there watching you, you know, it's - you do feel a weight. You know, you feel an obligation to not only be - to give the best performance that you can, but to make sure that you represent this person.
As an actor, you don't want to know the beginning and end to your character's arc. It makes it more fun. You're not playing the end. You're playing it realistically. You don't know where this character is going to go and what's going to happen to him, which just makes it more interesting for the viewers to watch. They're going on the journey with you, as the actor and the character.
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.
I've seen some of those comments and they hurt me a little bit, saying 'This guy's a cheater.' And I feel like if you know me, you know my character, and just my person, you know that's not what I would do, not what I would ever do.
I sense a kind of fear of writing black or Asian characters from non-ethnic writers, who perhaps feel that they don't know the culture and therefore can't write about it. By and large, if there's an Asian character, I might get a call. But if the character is called 'Philip,' the chances are I won't.
If everyone's happy, then I'm the character where when I enter that means there's trouble. In a movie, when I enter, it's not a good thing. But I know where I'm at. But, you know, you don't have to call me by my character's name for months on end. Football taught me that, because you can go from being best friends to having to play that person on another team, you have to be able to turn that on and off. You need to find that middle ground.
I am an actor and I do not have to relate to whatever I play on screen them at a personal level. What is important is to understand the character, do enough homework to know the frame of mind of the character or his back story.
There are some actors that want you to call them by their character's name and they have no relationship with you outside of the character. But I like to get to know who I'm working with so that we can relax together, and it's more fun.
I’d like to be the kind of actor who is remembered for my character. You know how there are cases where even when you watch all the way through the end of a drama, you remember the actor’s name, not the character’s. I want my character’s name to be more remembered than mine.
When you start out on a project as an actor, you know, you approach the character from the standpoint of maybe writing a list - even if it's a mental list that you make - of the adjectives that the character has or that character possesses.
I don't know how to be like a Bill Murray or a Will Ferrell, these guys who know how to make a line funny just by, I don't know, some extra-sense perception. I only know character and emotion and real acting; that's all I know how to do.
The only thing that I know how to do as an actor, as a trained actor, is you can't villainize the character you're playing. Whether it's a fictional character or a real character. Because then you operate from that sort of negative point of view, and you can't humanize him.
I have found that the characters in my novels stay with me after a book has ended. I know them in some sense. I never map anything out. I just think until I am secure in the voice of one of them, and then let the character unfold.
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