Top 1200 Stage Actors Quotes & Sayings - Page 20

Listen, I like great actors. You can be a movie star without being a great actor - this has been proved several times - and I like my casts to have great actors. Acting is more important to me than being a star.

I love being in an arena that has like 10,000 people and huge crowds. I want to do a show at like the Viper room so badly. Like go up on stage and thrash myself around, go jump into the crowd. You can effing swear, get drunk on stage and do whatever you want basically.

British actors come at acting from a slightly different angle. Because a lot of the films are cast out there, they are so used to the angle from which the Americans, and certainly the young guys from LA, are coming at it, that I think it's interesting for them to find these English actors who maybe approach acting from a different place.

Some actors come to casting and ask me, "Didn't you see my previous roles?" We do not work with actors like this. Their previous roles do not matter; I need the actual work with an actor in this particular character that has been written in our script. What matters is flexibility, believability and efficiency of an actor.

It might be different for people that are A-list actors, but a lot of us really look at what's offered to us and look for something that has some traction with other people. But, it's not like I read 100 scripts a week, and then pick and choose. Maybe some actors do. I certainly don't do that.

As actors, we need public relations to campaign for our next possible role, and any media promoting our work seems positive in nature; but whether in theater or on a film set, a bad unprofessional photograph at the wrong angle may not be as flattering to some actors, and may be considered a harmful exposure.

The big issue with rock stars becoming actors is that sometimes it's not believable, and vice versa with actors becoming rock stars. Sometimes just doesn't fit.

One time, I came off stage and a guy named Roman Decare, God rest his soul, he was a comic. 'Louie, if you do that family stuff, and you're a clean comic on stage, you'll become famous.' And, for some reason, a switch clicked, and I started doing the family stuff, and it became a giant part of my life.

Accept your loneliness. It is one stage, and only one stage, on a journey that brings you to God. It will not always last. Offer up your loneliness to God, as the little boy offered to Jesus his five loaves and two fishes. God can transform it for the good of others. Above all, do something for somebody else!

Every revolution begins as consciousness because some group of people has to imagine change. You have to have the idea of change or at least have a hope before you can proceed. And that stage goes very quickly because a contagion of consciousness is within your control. But when you get to the stage of institutional change, it becomes a much slower process.

The beautiful thing about stand-up advice is that it applies to anybody, any gender, any race, any age. The best thing you can do - everybody will tell you - is get on stage as much as you can. I would add to that: get on stage as much as you can - with the people you admire.

I've found a lot of the thinking in America is that a lot of people become actors to become famous. At least from my experience, I have a dozen or so British friends who are actors, and if you look at their body of work, and they'll go do theatre, and they'll go do this and this. They work, and they're always honing and trying to be better.

I loved to make people laugh in high school, and then I found I loved being on stage in front of people. I'm sure that's some kind of ego trip or a way to overcome shyness. I was very kind of shy and reserved, so there's a way to be on stage and be performing and balance your life out.

I think film writing, you're thinking in pictures, and stage writing, you're thinking in dialogue. In film writing, it's also, you only get so many words, so everything has to earn its place in a really economical way. I think for stage writing, you have more leeway.

Period films to me are very often alienating to the audience. There's very often a formality. A staunchy quality to them that comes from the misenscene. It also comes from the performances of the actors, because they're acting Victorian which really means that they're just acting the way they've seen previous actors act Victorian.

People have a different idea of how movies are made than they really are. On a certain level, everyone throws ideas into the hopper. It's not like the actors are wind-up dolls that you push out onto the floor, play with, then put back in the box. You get people around you who you trust; the writer, the producer, the director and all the actors all contribute.

I got to live out my 11-year-old fantasies - I got to go on stage with Green Day. Billie Joe called my name from the stage. 'Dookie' was the first album I ever bought. I covered the whole of 'Nimrod' and he'd heard it. That was like the 11-year-old girl dreamed.

Hollywood likes to put actors in boxes, and it likes to put Asian actors in really small boxes.

I always had something to think about or draw from, which as an actor is a gift. The beautiful thing about film is that it gets so much closer than stage. I love stage and that's what I started doing and it's a beautiful art form in of itself, but in film you can move your eyes to the side and somehow the audience can fill in the blanks of what you're thinking.

An actor is supposed to emulate life. Instead, alas, many are imitating other actors. You don't fashion your knowledge of theatre or your approach to a role on the basis of what other actors have done. This kind of thinking is a great danger, especially in dealing with TV producers who frequently say things like, 'This is a Sean Connery type.'

It doesn't matter if you work with an Oscar winner or if you work with an unknown actor. There is always a collaboration between the director and the actors, and you always have to listen as the actors have to listen to you as a director.

Once you go on stage you're essentially creating the world that people want to participate in. The worst thing you can do is go out on stage with the idea that you're going to communicate something you've learned and if you do it really well, they'll approve. If you go out in an approval process, you will be so nervous and so preoccupied you'll never get to the heart of what it is you want to make music with.

Playing a drunk doesn't mean being a drunk, only bad actors try to be drunk. A real drunk tries to be sober, he wants another drink. How a character hides their feelings tells us who they are, no one shows their feelings except bad actors.

In film, the camera can get an array of shots so the audience can see the emotion the character is giving off. Using close-ups on the character's face really helps get the message across. On stage, you can't do that. But the stage has that live feeling that you can't get anywhere else because the audience is right there.

If there's anything I know about directing, it's how to make actors comfortable. It's where I started and it's what I know, and it's what I love. I like when the actors are really partners and I want them to be excited and I want them to surprise me. I don't want them to be puzzle pieces.

Oh dear," said Sarah anxiously, "I do wish he wouldn't do these silly things." I'm sure we all wish that, Sarah," said Marcia sternly. "But unfortunately he has progressed rather further than the silly stage. Evil-minded-scheming stage is more what I would call it.

Every actor I think has got their own number of takes that they like, you know. Some actors like to go all day, you know on the one scene and some actors want to take two takes. I personally like four.

Between New York and L.A., and all of us who are actors, I feel like we're just one big, cast repertory company, all running back and forth between the coasts and between different shows. There is a wealth of great character actors, who show up, here and there, on different shows. I love the fact that we're allowed to do that.

People who do not have funny in them are not funny when they read funny lines. Sorry. Just doesn't work that way. Seriously, this is the biggest rule of all. You live and die with your casting decisions. Your actors are the heart and soul of the whole thing. Without brilliant actors, you will not have a brilliant film.

I deal with the depraved, the sick, the pathetic, the disturbing and the profoundly depressed. I will try it all on. I will try on what I am and what I never want to be. And everything I wanted to be, but never can be. I can be a supermodel, or your worst nightmare. Off-stage, I just get to leave it, and nobody thinks I'm like that. This is what prevents me from being a psychopath and a sociopath, my time on stage.

I think the ultimate goal is that when we're off-stage, we know everything our character is thinking. Hopefully when we are on-stage, our thoughts are our character's thoughts because we really know that much about them.

What happens in the studio is technically the same thing that happens on the stage. In the past I had to make quite brutal adaptations of the material to make it work on stage. I don't always like doing that because sometimes you're shaving away the things that you actually quite like about them, the spontaneity of it.

When I come off stage, I just shut up. I try as best I can not to use my voice at all. You know I love to talk, but I try when I come off stage to have the minimum amount of vocal interaction because I need at least a good 10 hours to just recover from my form of extreme singing.

Taking drugs on a recreation level is one thing. But taking them while you're working on a stage is, I don't think it was that great. It's the control factor. And the thing about being on stage, you really want to feel that you're sort of in control a lot. It's not a place where you want to be out of control.

With a group of people, a troupe of actors in the theater, you go out on tour, and you're like a traveling circus. It's very sociable, and there's a real community, and it's very intense, and then you may never see them again. That was very appealing. I mean, it wasn't consciously appealing, but I think a lot of actors like that.

Your actors need to trust you as a director, but normally, I think you just need to have an open communication between the actors and the director. I think the director needs to really paint his or her vision to the cast and let them know the kind of mood that he or she is making. I think that's very important.

The headmistress was a very well-respected theater teacher. She taught me what stage left and stage right were, what a director was, and what all these things meant, which was something I had no concept of. She sent me off to drama school, at age 18, and I stayed there for three years. Before I knew it, I was working on a TV show.

We live in a world of absolute immediacy. It is an interconnected, combustible world, where technology and many other actions have given nonstate actors a reach, into countries and societies, for both good and evil, that we have never seen before. So it isn't a matter of just state versus state challenges or conflict. The bigger problem is nonstate actors.

It's odd, how those things happen to actors. A thing where you think, "I have no idea how to do this," something will happen in your life comes up and you just get it. I don't know how you get it, but actors are pretty extraordinary, in that regard. I think it's fear that happens.

There is always a collaboration between the director and the actors, and you always have to listen as the actors have to listen to you as a director. In the end, you as a director, of course, are the captain on the ship.

Acting is a difficult profession, it really is. It's different than singing. With singing you may have one song and four people to record it - but they'll all do it differently and they'll all have that option. Whereas with actors there might be one part, and five hundred actors all want the same role - it's so much more competitive. It's an incredibly painful profession because you get so much rejection.

This work should commence with the conception of man, and should describe the nature of the womb, and how the child inhabits it, and in what stage it dwells there, and the manner of its quickening and feeding, and its growth, and what interval there is between one stage of growth and another, and what thing drives it forth from the body of the mother, and for what reason it sometimes emerges from the belly of its mother before the due time.

Film just chews up actors like nobody's business, and I'm not particularly interested in being chewed up. I think the camera can only look at somebody's face for so long. I guess you have to accept the roles you think are right at the time. You can build a career, but these days there doesn't seem to be that much interest in people being actors.

English actors feel vaguely apologetic for being there at all. American actors know that the most important thing is to get one take out of fifty that is great, and they'll go to any length to get it. The English are used to working within consistently small, low-budget things and think, I mustn't waste their time.

I started in '88 to play House music, it was a huge revolution for me. I went to London and I saw a DJ on stage and that was crazy at the time. I was one of the really respected and famous DJs in Paris, but they would never show me. I was hidden. A DJ on stage and people dancing and facing the DJ, looking at him? I was like 'wow!'

In 2006, when doing a live stage show in Ireland, I tried for the first time to instantly induct a subject on stage, something I had never done before, nor did I know if it would ever work. The result almost cost me my career; the man I grabbed and instantly inducted went out cold and fell to the floor.

Directly after Rock Hudson's death came the fears that gay writers and actors and directors would be denied jobs; who knew if they would live long enough to finish a feature film or television series? And would the unions force directors to give blood tests and ban actors who tested positive?

We've always dreamt of a TV series and working in film. When we first sat down to seriously write 'A Little Nightmare Music,' to write something for TV was our original inspiration. But all the stuff we were writing down is not going to work on stage. We had to rewrite it so it would work on the stage.

I'm a Gemini, so there's two people in me. Straight up. There's the nerd who is totally zoned out in the studio, EQ-ing this kick drum, raising this snare one decibel, or swapping this high hat out for another. Then there's the other side who's a performer. I have to go out on stage and be electric, a fire cracker, just run around the stage and give a show.

I was very familiar with both actors, as well as Christina Hendricks and Bill Sage, Jimmi Simpson, Polly McIntosh, but the other main actors were new to me. And they were all terrific. Just amazing. Actually, Lowell Northrop optioned Savage Season from me, first book in the series, and I wrote a screenplay.

Getting to do shows with Lady Antebellum, Keith Urban, and Sam Hunt is just awesome. It's so inspiring because I grew up such fans of Lady A and Keith, and to be able to sing my songs on the same stage as them and then stand side stage and watch them is just a really special thing.

When a theater goes dark for the night, a stagehand leaves a lighted lamp on stage. No one knows why any more, but some old timers say it is to keep the ghosts away. Others say it lights the stage for the ghosts to play. Whichever theory one adheres to, most people agree: a great theater is haunted.

I love my situation as a spectator. The actors are only a little bit ahead of the audience. The audience discovers the episode when it's screened, but we actors only discover the episode when we get the script, two weeks ahead of shooting. Until then, we know nothing of the evolution of our characters.

I love a certain kind of acting style that I would call non-American, which tends to be more detail-oriented and less externalized. There's a kind of naturalism that I often find in non-American actors. I also find that quality in the American actors I work with, but I like to bring in those influences creatively.

In a sense, all actors are character actors, because we're all playing different characters. But a lot of the time - and I don't know, because I'm not a writer - but writers a lot of times write second- and third-tier characters better than they write primary characters. I guess they're more fun.

I like to work with actors that have varied experiences. But I don't choose them because of their experience, I choose them because of qualities I think would make an interesting character and to me there is no one way to direct actors, there is only one way to collaborate with one person.

When I started in the profession, there were very visible actors who were Scottish, Welsh, or regional. Lots of working-class-hero leading actors; it was not fashionable to sound posh. Now, I'm middle-aged; it's fashionable to sound posh if you are the generation behind me.

In the U.K. and Ireland, crowd-work is a big thing. It shows you how funny someone would be if you met them off-stage. Americans don't care if you're funny off-stage. They want to see the writing; they want to see the work you did.

In film, the camera can get an array of shots so the audience can see the emotion the character is giving off. Using close-ups on the characters face really helps get the message across. On stage, you cant do that. But the stage has that live feeling that you cant get anywhere else because the audience is right there.

The idea the actors are the most important people on a film set I think is very stupid. Actors are the most replaceable people there. There are literally millions of us. There's very few people that can operate a steady-cam. The numbers are a lot, lot fewer for that, you know?