A Quote by Ryan Gosling

I think that you can sort of have your own personal journey and you know, you can just kind of apply that to whatever characters you're playing. — © Ryan Gosling
I think that you can sort of have your own personal journey and you know, you can just kind of apply that to whatever characters you're playing.
The thing is, even if you're playing sort of a heightened character and playing inside sort of a heightened reality, you can still apply your own truths to those characters.
I'm socially awkward. What draws me to playing socially awkward characters? I think they're interesting. I'm fascinated kind of by - I mean, I know I'm sure I've got my own social awkwardness but I'm kind of fascinated by that and I lived, probably, I attribute it - I lived in New York for a long time, road the subways, saw a lot of awkwardness, but they're just interesting. They're not cookie cutter. They're usually very colorful characters. They see things different ways and, I don't know, its just a kind of - just a kind of life that interesting to me.
When you do these things, you sort of take the journey. The journey is all about how I can interweave the Oscar Wilde story, the story of Salome, the play itself and what it is, what it contains, and my journey as an actor, as a director, as a filmmaker, as a person struggling with whatever I'm struggling with - my own celebrity, my own life. This is semi-autobiographical in terms of my commitment to this kind of thing.
I don't think your personal life has anything to do with your professional life. They are separate things. Whatever is happening at home shouldn't be carried to work. Everyone has his/her own journey. Some revel in the fact that they derive that from personal contentment, and others draw it from extreme sorrow.
People talk about 'date night,' and it is true: Sometimes you have to apply yourself, or at least apply lipstick to yourself. You kind of have to dress up, just because. You know, wear heels to your own dinner table.
What I discovered with acting is that you step out of your own personal life and you connect with characters that are not you and you try to understand their journey. I have three Chihuahuas, but I'm not a father. I can put myself in the position of playing a father on a TV show, by paying closer attention to my friends that have kids and by spending more time with my nephew.
It's hard to actually take details from your personal life and apply them a scene because, as much as you can identify with a feeling, you just get muddled. As soon as you start bringing your own stuff in, it's like, 'No, that's not right.' You're playing a different person. You can relate, but you have to leave that stuff at the door.
Gettting to know your characters is so much more important than plotting. Working out every detail of your story in advance, especially when you don't yet know your main characters, always seems a little too much like playing God. You're working out your characters' lives, their destiny, before they've had a chance to discover who they are and what kind of people they want to be.
I think a spiritual journey is not so much a journey of discovery. It's a journey of recovery. It's a journey of uncovering your own inner nature. It's already there.
My favorite actors are actors who are enigmatic and mysterious and never make the obvious choice in terms of the projects they do or who they work with or their craft. But I think that the less I know about an actor, the more chance I have of allowing their own persona to kind of slip away so I can get completely lost in the character they're playing, and the more that people think they know about your personal life, the more difficult it becomes to preserve that.
Whatever I'm working on, the character I'm playing tends to slowly bleed into my own real life. Not in any kind of creepy, Method actor-y kind of way - it's just an innate kind of merging.
We all have to pick our battles. You've got to draw a line in the sand and stand firm. And it's this squishiness that's really the enemy, like, "Well, I don't know, it's kind of OK but I kind of feel guilty, and I kind of want a bran muffin, I don't know, and I'm wearing a vest; it's crocheted." Shut up. Just pick your battle and just stand there, and whatever you are going to do, own it.
I've been trying to take this journey over the last four years of getting away from playing manipulative and villainous characters and playing characters that are affected by what happens to them as opposed to unaffected.
Although they only give gold medals in the field of athletics, I encourage everyone to look into themselves and find their own personal dream, whatever that may be - sports, medicine, law, business, music, writing, whatever. The same principles apply. Turn your dream into a goal and learn how to attack that goal systematically. Break it into bite-size chunks that seem possible, and then don't give up. Just keep plugging away.
You don't know anybody is in the stands when you are out there on the field playing. You don't know what the number is or who, what, or whatever. You are playing and trying to give your best. When you are in the game you got so much going on in your head and your so attentive in listening to the quarterback call whatever shots he's going to call. Your mind is concentrated on your responsibility and what you have to do on every given play. You don't know anything else is around, but your responsibility.
I think it's interesting playing characters who are flawed and make mistakes because we all have - no one's just one thing - no one is just bad or just good - so I like finding flawed characters and playing with their redeeming qualities, whether you play it outwardly or not. I think that one of the reasons I'm an actor is that I love people and I love finding out who they are and why they do the things they do, so it is fun to play those kinds of characters.
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