A Quote by Alla Nazimova
The actor should not play a part. Like the Aeolian harps that used to be hung in the trees to be played only by the breeze, the actor should be an instrument played upon by the character he depicts.
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I'm Irish and very proud of being Irish, but as an actor, your extraction should be secondary, really. You should be able to embody whatever character it is, wherever the character comes from. That's always been important, for me. I'm an actor who's Irish, not an Irish actor.
The only tool we have as artists is selectivity. If you're a painter, you select the color, the lines, how severe they should be. As an actor you develop how angry you should be. You select how angry you should be. You listen to the other actor and then you react. In film, sometimes the other actor isn't even there. You have to play the scene. What I do is I call on my experience on the stage. I play the scene and I hope that I reach a certain level of integrity because that's what I learned on the stage.
The only thing I have tried to do is be a part of different films and bring out a different side of me as an actor every time I play a character. I would like to be known as a versatile actor.
I didn't really look like a character actor, yet those were the roles I loved to play. If you were a character actor who didn't necessarily look like a character actor, you had to play bad guys.
An actor is an actor. There should be no labelling - mainstream actor, art film actor, serious actor, comic actor.
At the end of the day I can't change myself. It's only different characters that I play. And in those it should not be me, Atul Kulkarni, it should be the character that is being played by Atul Kulkarni.
I don't understand when people say character actors. You either have the protagonist or the antagonist and I've played both. It's an actor's role to play a character. Does that mean that main stream heroes and heroines are characterless?
There were probably a few games I played where I should not have played, because of some nagging injuries or something. I used to always talk the managers into playing me, because I wanted to play so badly.
I have played some wonderful leading roles on stage and had the whole 'China Beach' years where I really played a leading man on that. That was a fun change for a character actor. But I'm perfectly happy going back to building my gallery of memorable character roles.
Learning to play old instruments was a challenge. How do you learn an instrument no one has played in hundreds of years? The ones that are used today, I was adamant not to hear anyone else play that instrument. I want to approach them as a child and on the basis of each instrument. I wanted my voice to come through, not someone else's.
Some of my team-mates in the Under-18s used to play 'Call of Duty' and they told me I should jump on it. I have played it ever since, for my first one or two years I played it pretty much ever day, I was mad about it.
I used to play the drums. When I was 11 I got my first professional job, I played drums in a cabary and played Elvis and stuff, I used to play left handed actually. Then I started to pick up the guitar when I was around 15, but I played the drums for a long time.
You end up loving every character that you play but a lot of the people I've played, I should just say for myself, I played, I wouldn't necessarily want to continue playing them. I've done them. It's like going on a trip. You go, you're amazed, you're glad you're there but you're glad to get home. And that's how I feel most of the time.
The actor must know that since he, himself, is the instrument, he must play on it to serve the character with the same effortless dexterity with which the violinist makes music on his. Just because he doesn't look like a violin is no reason to assume his techniques should be thought of as less difficult.
I always thought the leading actor should be the best supporting actor, because you're the only person that can help every other actor on the set.
With that incredible voice that he [Alan Rickman] could play like a sort of wonderful instrument, like a cello or something. He played his voice, and he could be the most subtle of actors. And he could also be quite a big actor. He could do the grandiose performances as well.
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