A Quote by Christoph Waltz

The actor is there to translate what's on the page onto the stage or the screen. So I find it important that an actor manages to actually get out of the way, vanish as a person behind the character, never to be seen or talked about again. That's my philosophy.
When I was 18 and not sure whether I wanted to be an actor, I realised that a playwright has no voice without an actor. That's my reason for acting: to get that character as right as possible for my writer. And I have never changed my philosophy.
It's every actor's dream to be seen on the big screen. Having said that, it's also imperative to better yourself as an actor all the time. In that, all mediums become important in their own ways.
My strength as an actor is in the theater - I know that about myself. Some actors get onstage and vanish, but I'm much better there than I am on screen.
I never saw myself as a character actor or a lead actor; I've only seen myself as just an actor.
I think of myself as a character actor, compared to a straight actor. I know a character actor in England is pretty much the same as in the States; you're actually hired to put on terrible teeth and stuff like that.
My casting process was slightly different and slightly interesting insofar as I knew everybody could act. That's something you've seen. You know people can. You've seen them on the screen and you think either they're a good actor or a bad actor. So that's not the point. What I wanted to do was find people who I thought would have a similar comic sensibility.
I realise that certain actors project their own image onto the screen - those who are the same on as they are off. But I've never had the necessary statistics to be able to do that sort of thing, and so, anyway, I always wanted to be a character actor.
I never thought about being the first black actor to win, even though everybody else talked about that. If I stop to think as a black actor, people will see me differently. If I play as a black actor, people will only see that. I think my key was to perform as an actor, not as a black actor. And after winning the Cesar, I was an actor with a Cesar. there are many more adjectives to describe who I am. I'm not only black.
None of the actor methods ever discussed what it would be like to play a character on film for over a decade, and what it must be like to return to a character and imagine the time off-screen, which is interesting. There's something as an actor that I enjoy about evolving characters.
I don't see myself as one type of actor. When you get one role, you start to get cast in that role for awhile because that's what people have seen you do, and have hopefully seen you do it successfully. And so, it becomes an easier thing to see you as, for casting directors and directors, and they start to think of you as that particular person or type of character. But, for me, I'm just an actor, first and foremost. The actors I respect are the real character actors, who are the real chameleon actors that completely change from role to role.
I think, as an actor, I would find it a little run-of-the-mill doing procedurals where it's the same sort of thing week in and week out. Your character doesn't get to grow very much, which, purely from an actor's point of view, you want to see an arc of your character.
What's actually amazing is that, after a couple of years of living with characters and writing characters and talking about characters, as we sit in the writers room and break episodes, it strikes you, every once in awhile, that you're talking about a character that's played by the same actor, who you've been talking about forever. We talk about a character dying, so you get emotional, and then you realize, "Oh, but wait, that actor is still on the show."
Writing for the stage is different from writing for a book. You want to write in a way that an actor has material to work with, writing in the first person not the third person, and pulling out the dramatic elements in a bigger way for a stage presentation.
I didn't always mean to be an actor. I was carried onto the stage when I was two days old, but I never acted as a child. My parents were stage people.
One of the fun things as an actor is to find a character that if you were to look up a rap sheet about them, you might say, 'I don't really necessarily want to hang out with this guy' or 'I would never be this kind of guy in my life.' I think it's part of an actor's job to say, 'Maybe you could be.'
To me, casting is all about finding a character within the actor off the screen as much as on the screen.
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