Top 1200 Character Actor Quotes & Sayings - Page 3

I never thought I would sing or dance - ever, ever, ever. My idea was to be Laurence Olivier or Peter Lorre or some great classical actor. I thought I'd be a character actor.

Sometimes perception is almost more important than the skill level of an actor. And if you give too much away, you have nothing to take for yourself and put onscreen. If people feel like they know you too well, they won't be able to indentify with the character you're trying to portray. Or they'll feel that you're just playing yourself, and then you just become a personality actor. And that's the death of any actor.

I'm an actor and I've created a lasting and memorable character named Frasier, who is not me, but who most people think is. So when I have a chance to play something that's different, I embrace it because it's fun; also in this case, he's a memorable character.

With the type of actor I am, which includes really diving into a role and making it as real as possible, there's nothing better than working in a real environment on location. It forces you to feel what the character's feeling, and it allows you to live in the space of the character.

I don't think of an actor. I think in the character, and then I search for the actor. Usually I'm thinking without names, because they will change my idea. No big egos. If I want egos - just mine. That is enough.

My sense of myself is that I'm a character actor, and character actors are ready, willing, and able to do anything, to be totally different from themselves. That's my job, to be ready. I'm some kind of first responder.

I really tried to work out hard to emulate the look and feel of the character, and did my best to represent the great artists that created him. At the same time, as an actor you have to find what you relate to in the character and make it your own, and hopefully people respond to it.

I had a very low voice for the character in the show. I said, "That's not actually my voice. That's the character's voice." I'm being such an actor.

An actor knows much more about a character than the character knows about himself.

I love actors. I enjoy their company, and I get excited each and every time they bring a character I've written to life. Every so often a talented actor doesn't hook in correctly to a character; or someone gets lost in a labyrinth of over-complicated thoughts, and the character and play suffer. However, most of the time I find actors either end up doing exactly what was in my head, or sometimes do something even better.

I always wanted to be a character actor rather than the poster boy that they tried to make me 100 years ago. An actor has a degree of responsibility to change for the audience, to give them something new each time, to surprise and not bore them.

I am a professional actor and I don't go about moralizing about what the character does. Otherwise, seriously, why be an actor? You're not making some kind of social statement. That's not what actors do. They may inadvertently do it, but it's because of the script, not the acting.

I think every leading man wants to be a character actor, and every character actor wants to be a leading man.

It was hard saying goodbye to the character and harder saying goodbye to the actor. When rumours started going around that Rob Lowe might be leaving I got an email from Josh Malina asking if I'd be interested in an actor who was cheaper and not as good looking. I wrote back, "Always", and that was that.

As an actor, you don't want to ever get too comfortable where you're like, "I know this character," and you don't do the work anymore. Then, there's something that you're going to miss. If you always stay hungry to learn more about your character, that's a healthy thing, while having a great sense of who she is, at the core.

I was working in Chicago, in theater and in commercials and anything that anybody would let me do. When I moved to L.A., I had made a choice to be a character actor, meaning that I wanted to become somebody else. That's what attracted me to becoming an actor in the first place.

You know, the character of Isabelle in 'Love Crime' is the only character I feel the furthest from. I have nothing to share with her, so it was really difficult. Being an actor of composition is something, but you always base yourself on something you know about.

I'm a character actor.

As an actor, you want to be able to move your character forward into new ground, but also it's really interesting to go backwards and unpeel those layers and the interesting elements of what your character is and what informs the decisions that you make so that you can have as much meat to work with.

Performing as a musician is a lot different than performing as an actor. As an actor, you can hide behind the character in the play, and there's a director and other actors. When you're a musician, you're right there. It's sort of like being a comedian. You're giving the audience in real time something authentic from yourself. As an actor, my bullshit meter was going off like crazy at my first attempts to find my own rock star.

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.

For an actor, his job becomes easy, when his character is described well on the paper. With a well-written role, it becomes simpler to design and understand your character.

There is more than enough 'Venom' to go around. Venom is a really huge character, and Hardy is an amazing actor, so there is plenty to mine just from Tom's performance, the character and the world he inhabits.

As an actor, when you want to capture the spirit of the character, and the character exists in all of the iterations slightly differently, you work towards getting a sense of what the creators wanted to do, you know? Then, you work off of that.

The interesting thing about doing serial television is that the character is growing separate from you, the character and the show are growing, and you get to observe that and participate with it in a way that I think is actually really exciting for an actor.

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.

To be an actor and a director, I actually felt it helped me tremendously to be in the scenes of The Hollars, because as you can see, they're very intimate, very intense scenes. You don't want to break the actor's character and you don't want to break their momentum, so as the actor, I tried not to call cut as much as I could, and almost make it feel like a play, just set this environment where these amazing actors could do what they wanted to do.

When I was in college, I did sort of want to be a journalist. Being an actor, you kind of have the same interest. You go into a story, and you tell it from your point of view for people who aren't there. That's what an actor does with a character. But the real life is more more interesting.

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.

That's always my ambition is to create a character out of what will help tell the story. I've never been an actor to say my character wouldn't do that, because he should do that in order to help tell the story.

It is fun, revisiting a role. Usually, as an actor, you do a movie and you put that character up on a shelf, and he's done. That character is now immortalized on film, but you don't get to play him again. In these films [Twilight saga], we got to revisit these characters, and we didn't take that for granted.

If you are lucky as an actor, you are doing a character that really matches where you are in life, or you're doing a character that is not where you are. If it's somewhere in between, you have to use a lot of imagination and a lot of thought.

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.

I certainly don't like to play a bad guy. There are no bad people. It's only shades of grey. Also, I am not a great actor who can transform completely into a totally different character for a movie. I am not a trained actor.

I consider it an actor going to work with other actors. It's not a competitive sport, it's not to outact anybody else, sorta thing, you can be a bad actor but you don't outact anybody, you just bring your character as best as you can.

An actor is an actor is an actor. The less personality an actor has off stage the better. A blank canvas on which to draw the characters he plays.

I think Ryan Gosling is a really great actor who's meticulous about his work. And I'd love to have the guts that Johnny Depp has to actually go outside the box on a character. When he plays a character, he plays it in a way that nobody else would.

As an actor, you don't really have a say or a voice in what the conversation of the show is going to be. So, as an actor, I'm just trying to make sense of why the character is making these choices, and somehow, in that way, you can sympathize or root, at least not detest, what this person is doing. That's, at least, my job in telling that story.

You wanna do a lot of backstory for your character - as an actor, you wanna research that. But on the show, it's fun to remain in that naive place as you go along, and be able to continue to discover things about your character as the writers come up with them.

In feature films, I used to be the hero's friend, a regular character. In short films, I played the hero; I got roles where I could work on my character and performance. They made me aware of myself as an actor.

What's with the whole 'child actor' and 'teen actor' thing? You're either an actor or actress, or you're not. I don't get it! I want to be taken seriously as an actor.

As an actor, you have to just think about the truth of your character. You have to think about how to play the character in the way that you know it needs to be played in your heart and why you were hired.

I feel like I express myself, as an actor. Whatever the character is put in front of me, I try to bring truth to it, whichever way it lands. I try to bring as much truth to it and make it as believable as I can. I think that's the job of an actor.

Thing is, I'm a funny actor, but I'm not good at being funny. I'm going to ramble for a second: I'm an actor who can make things funny in the moment, like in stakes or in circumstances or out of character.

As an actor, I think it's always important to separate yourself from your characters because, when you include yourself in a character, you're taking a liberty that you don't really have unless you're life is that incredibly close to the character.

It doesn't matter if a character is a lawyer, a cop or a geography teacher. If there's a story in there, where the character has a passion and a fire in his belly and story to tell, then it's enough for an actor to get excited about.

Being a TV actor is quite different from being a movie star, and I always try and highlight my character. It is the reason why I am more inclined to taking frequent sabbaticals: so that when I return, people can identify with the character I play.

It makes it easier, if you can't do an American accent. I don't know. It's different. I played a character in Never Let Me Go where the script for my character was very sparse, and I enjoyed it. With Never Let Me Go, I had a whole book written from my character's point of view, so I always knew where I was. But, with Ryan [Gosling], it was just easy. He's such a brilliant actor and he is so prepared. He doesn't have to warm himself up to be in a scene. He's just in it. It draws you in, in a way.

I've never taken a job as an actor that I wasn't 100-percent sure I wanted to do. I've never had to think about whether or not I wanted to do something, and there have always been a lot of factors to that. I don't think I'm an actor who's driven by character, to be honest.

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.

I'm just a character actor.

Preparing a character is the opposite of building-it is a demolishing, removing brick by brick everything in the actor's muscles, ideas and inhibitions that stands between him and the part, until one day, with a great rush of air, the character invades his every pore.

You want to try and bring a character to life in an honest a way as you possibly can. It doesn't matter whether he's a doctor, an actor, a car salesman or a captain of a starship. If you can bring truth and honesty to that character, then your audience will believe you.

You know, the hard thing about audiences not liking what a character does is that they sometimes take it out on the actor personally. That's something that you know when you become an actor or actress, but it's always hard to deal with when it actually happens.

I was born a character actor.

You need an actor who can maintain a character over a long period of time. If you have a weak actor, it won't be obvious in two hours, but you'll begin to see his weaknesses over four or five days.

I guess you can say that every actor is a 'character actor' on some level. But I think some actors have a wider range. I think that's how you get that mantle.

I do think I'm a character actor.

[And on going from character to leading actor] I don't approach anything differently; I just approach it as a character. I'm always astounded at the fact that I've ever played a leading character in anything [Laughs]. And my wife concurs with that, frankly. She always thought I would be, at best, the wacky neighbor on a sitcom, so this is all just a surprise and a joy.

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.