Character Acting Quotes

#1. My whole background is character acting: weird costumes, fat suits, playing men, playing animals - I've never played anyone with whom there's any overlapping Venn diagram.

Allison Williams

#2. Years of live storytelling and character acting have helped me with building vivid locations and scenes.

David Crabb

#3. I would love to do more acting; I really would love to do it, particularly character acting. I'm a character type of actor; I love situations where I've got a bit of room to improvise on the character.

Sharlto Copley

#4. Character acting is a much braver pursuit than a guy who runs around and intermittently clenches his jaw muscles.

Ryan Reynolds

#5. I think good acting is always character acting.

William Sadler

#6. I hadn't done just a straight-out comedy in a long time, just letting an ensemble do really good character acting, having them carry the movie as in my earlier pictures.

Brian De Palma

#7. I think I've grown up in an era where character acting on film has become less desirable for the producers and directors and therefore the audience. They have got used to the people that those actors really are.

David Suchet

#8. I have quite a normal family and I'm bored with how normal my family is. I want to mess stuff up a bit. I chose the messed up characters because I find that that's acting. I want to explore emotions that you otherwise wouldn't be able to explore.

Chloe Grace Moretz

#9. There is a perfect rout of characters in every man - and every man is like an actor's trunk, full of strange creatures, new & old. But an actor and his trunk are two different things

Wallace Stevens

#10. I'm far, far, far from that. But of course, that's one of the joys of acting is that you can move up in the world, even if - you know, in the characters that you're playing, even if you don't.

Maggie Smith

#11. With big, emotional roles it's very easy, especially if you've grown up in the American school of acting, to exploit your own pain. You have to be careful about that, because 9 times out of 10, your pain is not appropriate to the character.

Laura Linney

#12. It's all about story and character with me, and I don't care if the job is on daytime or prime time or the web. Hey, give me a good character and someone to listen, and I'll do my acting on a street corner.

Justin Hartley

#13. Because Naughty Dog relies on their facial team to hand animate the faces of each game character and they do such a remarkable job, I think you can be more realistic with your acting. It gives the story and what's happening to you the feeling that it's a game.

Nolan North

#14. Character actor' is a technical term denoting a clever stage performer who cannot act, and therefore makes an elaborate study of the disguises and stage tricks by which acting can be grotesquely simulated.

George Bernard Shaw

#15. When you have a book as material as it is, it's a lot easier to create a character because you have so many resources to draw upon when acting.

Asa Butterfield

#16. I think acting has helped me come out of my shell because when I play a character, I can't be self-conscious.

Joan Cusack

#17. There's a lot of romanticisation of the intuitive actor and method acting and all kinds of notions about getting inside a character and coming out from there.

Edward Norton

#18. There were time when I was into method acting that I did have moments of residual character emotions, because the method bases your emotional responses as a character on emotional experiences from your real life.

Corin Nemec

#19. For me, acting comes straight from the heart. In that sense I don't act at all. I think that to feel the character's pain I have to be myself. Somewhere audiences see that.

Salman Khan

#20. Acting is a skill that not only requires talent, but a determination: The willpower to shake off reality and plunge yourself into yourself into a character than you have to act on.

Low Kay Hwa

#21. When you're in your early 20s, a lot of characters can be one or two dimensional. You want a role to substantiate the drama, as opposed to actually analyzing the psychology of a human being. That's what drew me to acting, particularly the contradictions in people.

Tom Hughes

#22. Surely, 'tis one step towards acting well, to think worthily of our nature; and as in common life, the way to make a man honest, is, to suppose him soso here, to set some value upon ourselves, enables us to support the characterof generosity and virtue.

Laurence Sterne

#23. For me, the challenge of a period film is that, unlike a contemporary film where the character can be very free-form when it comes to the acting, there's a burden to acting in a period film because you have to stay within the character's historical background and the gestures of certain periods.

Donnie Yen

#24. I do tend to gravitate to the more dramatic side of things. I love feeling intense emotions when I'm acting. I just love characters and stories with conflict.

Aaron Paul

#25. I had given thought to acting, but I never really had a good enough opportunity or a character who made sense and paralleled my life a little bit. I feel like I'm one of the poster boys for a bad guy in a movie. I feel like I'm a good person to play a bad guy in a movie. I can say that.

Gucci Mane

#26. That's what acting is all about - it's all about bringing truth from your own life, and putting it into your characters. If you have the advantage of using your own life in your work, that's always the way to go.

Michael Eklund

#27. Great acting is being able to create a character. Great character is being able to be yourself.

John Leguizamo

#28. If the character is getting mad, getting upset or getting turned on, you're getting to see that in the facial tones and the skin tones. That's what I enjoy about acting. It can be very subtle, like that.

Michael Rooker

#29. Acting didn't solve much! If it did, I would have ended up much less crazy than I am today, but I'm not. At least for me, acting is a relief - a relief to be able to admit certain things about myself and disguise in my work, in my characters.

Dustin Hoffman

#30. When I connect to my soul, project it into another # character , and then bring it to the stage or to a film
that has always been for me the great joy of # acting . It's been as if my soul kind of leaps out of my body and is able to be free and dance around.

Kyra Sedgwick

#31. Good acting comes from finding the essence of a character.

John Larroquette

#32. The point was - he wasn't acting. It was as if he'd forgotten how! Jack still knew his lines, but he was out of character ... Jack had stopped acting. He was just Jack Burns - the real Jack Burns at last.

John Irving

#33. In acting, you have to pull from real-life situations, from people, to help develop a character.

Kevin Hart

#34. I don't concern myself with thinking ahead to the finished product. I focus more specifically on what the character is experiencing. Once you relieve yourself of the very arbitrary and always punishing pressure of what an audience is expecting you to do, acting becomes a lot more fun and pure.

Jesse Eisenberg

#35. The first step to a better audition is to give up character and use yourself.

Michael Shurtleff

#36. When you do your comedy and your drama, your acting style doesn't change. If it's a comedy, the situations and the characters might be a little funnier, but you're just trying to be honest.

Jonah Hill

#37. I always think of the character as being me. But me wearing a 'coat', which may be a different way of speaking, moving or regarding other people. To me, acting is pretending, just like kids playing, only you pretend as if it were really, really real.

Fred Melamed

#38. I've been in the studio experimenting on making a CD of my own. I'm trying out different producers, styles, sounds. With music, as opposed to acting, you are not playing a character. You are showing people who you are. I really want to have my spirit in it.

Emmy Rossum

#39. When I'm acting, I just want to be the character and not have to think of any film technicalities.

Denzel Whitaker

#40. I'm an actor; I have made my living by acting, and I almost think I owe it to the public to express my feelings and not as a character on a screen but as myself.

Kirk Douglas

#41. Using clothes to transform was a huge part of my childhood. But also, I've been acting forever, and wardrobe changes the way you feel, so it totally indicates the character you're going to play.

Allison Mack

#42. After much consideration, I am moving onward with a combination of disappointment at leaving behind a character I have loved playing for seven years and excitement of the new opportunities in acting and producing that lie ahead.

Lisa Edelstein

#43. There's only one reason why a character drinks: to seek confrontation. To fight for what they want in ways normally denied them.

Michael Shurtleff

#44. Acting is make-believe. I never believe I'm the character; I want you to believe.

Kirk Douglas

#45. Yeah, I think the common denominator - and this is probably going to sound like Acting 101 - but the common denominator is belief in the character in the moment.

Jenna Elfman

#46. I love trying to play the not-confident guy, the guy against my normal character, because that's when real acting comes into play.

Kellan Lutz

#47. I'm looking forward to playing some really despicable characters at some point in my career so I can branch out and stretch those acting muscles. But I wouldn't want to do that on a regular basis.

Zachary Levi

#48. In dreams we see ourselves naked and acting out our real characters, even more clearly than we see others awake.

Henry David Thoreau

#49. Also, in my acting, I feel very much like a storyteller, exploring the flaws of the characters that I interpret. I look for the imperfections, and I love a character that is just so flawed.

Danny Huston

#50. I like to rehearse with the actors scenes that are not in the script and will not be in the film because what we're really doing is trying to establish their character, and good acting to me is about reacting.

Jim Jarmusch

#51. It doesn't matter to me whether I go back to outer space or not [while acting]. The job's the same and I don't have any sort of genre preferences. I'm looking for a good story and a good character, whether earthbound or not.

Harrison Ford

#52. As always, with acting, you can't be too self-conscious. You shouldn't care about what people are thinking about you at the time because they're not caring about you, they're caring about the character.

Freddie Highmore

#53. It kind of varies. I don't have a method yet. It depends on the script and the character I think I need. I've worked with acting coaches, researched roles, and channeled different parts of myself. It's on a case-by-case for me, right now.

Zoe Kravitz

#54. Two things are always happening in acting. On the one hand, it's a team sport. We're all pulling together. But on the other, you have to look after your own character. Guard their interests.

Domhnall Gleeson

#55. Acting has helped me understand people, not only because you are acting as a character, but also because you are watching other actors work. That really helps you identify in life when someone is acting, not being true.

Steve Martin

#56. Sometimes I am kind of the opposite of my character. But that's the thing about acting, you get to play people who are not like you at all.

Dakota Fanning

#57. It sure is boring to be around people who are in character all the time. I always find it's closer to mental illness than acting excellence.

William H. Macy

#58. Who is the ultimate dreamer? Call it as you will: God, higher consciousness, Krishna, spirit, whatever pleases you.. One dream, one dreamer, billions of embodied characters acting out that one dream.. Your true essence is that you are part and parcel of the one big dream.

Wayne Dyer

#59. In acting class, teachers talk about how the 'givens' of a situation help define a character.

Hill Harper

#60. I don't cry. Well, you know, I think coming from an acting background that's really helped me because I more than anyone know that an actor creates a character.

Joanna Kerns

#61. I think that acting involves doing your job so well that you are able to help the viewer identify with the character.

Ally Sheedy

#62. Acting is not acting. It isn't putting on a face and dancing around in a mask. It's believing that you are that character and playing him as if it were a normal day in the life of that character.

Haley Joel Osment

#63. As we mature and grow older we collect a lot of baggage, and a lot of that stuff you collect on life's journey gets in the way of acting. My kids can imagine a character and transform in the blink of an eye. It's so simple for kids, so complex for adults.

David Wenham

#64. I'm a bug on acting, which distinguishes Second City from a lot of other revues. It comes from the character, the behavior, and not from the jokes. I don't think jokes are funny. Humor comes out of character and out of situations the character is in.

Bernard Sahlins

#65. 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.

David Suchet

#66. I don't know how to play myself. I'm not interested enough in myself. That's just not how I was educated. That's not how I learned to become an actor. Acting is creating a character.

Corey Stoll

#67. When I'm playing a character, I am never allowed to explicitly state the the takeaway message of the scenes I'm performing - after all, part of the dramatic conflict is that the person I'm portraying doesn't really know it yet.

Lena Dunham

#68. I'm completely in control of creating my photographs, and I'm not always in complete control of creating a character. It's more of a way to express myself than acting is, by far.

Alexandra Breckenridge

#69. There are certain things I learned when I first started learning about acting, to try and place the character physically and emotionally. And the way you place them emotionally is often with humor.

David Duchovny

#70. I began by doing a lot of character work on TV, just fun acting parts.

Robert Redford

#71. I never studied acting, yet the first time I auditioned and did a cold reading, I surprised everyone for my honesty and limpidity. They told me I could play any role because I have no walls, I don't put anything between me and the character I have to play.

Jennifer Lawrence

#72. With proper acting, I don't know what I would play - I got sent a script for a play, and it said in the notes that my proposed character was 'hideously fat and ugly'. That made my day. I mean, I do know I am no oil painting.

Jo Brand

#73. Acting is so exciting to me. It's a thrill; otherwise I wouldn't do it. Not to be hokey, but I think life is definitely worth living, whether you're working or not. For an actor, the character is the thing ... it doesn't matter what medium you're in. as long as you have something to do.

Elizabeth Mitchell

#74. While it is challenging working with a kid, because they're so of the moment all the time. My acting style is to try to take something from my life that the character can relate to and that I can relate the character to.

Kyra Sedgwick

#75. When you write a character and their dialogue, you can't help imagining how you would be acting if you were them. You kind of have to relate to all of them. It's the most personal thing I've ever done.

Tom Ford

#76. I'd had an early stint in acting school, and there was something satisfying about becoming a character, about being inside another mind that you had to create out of yourself. As I moved toward a life in writing, I found many of the things I'd learned in acting school still applied.

Michael Redhill

#77. The point of acting is to hide yourself and get lost in character. To play the same character in eighteen movies would be defeating the purpose I believe so I try to keep a little bit of diversity.

Columbus Short

#78. Acting is not pretending or lying. It's finding a side of yourself that's the character and ignoring your other sides. And there's a side of me that wonders what's wrong with being completely honest.

Angelina Jolie

#79. I won't even think about acting in a role where I didn't do a back story for a character.

Quentin Tarantino

#80. Man, having an ideal before him of that which he ought to be, and is not, and acting as though he possessed the character he ought to have, but has not, comes, by the very virtue of his aspiration, to possess the character he imagines.

William Batchelder Greene

#81. When it comes to acting, it's about creating a character and bringing forth a director's vision. It's a weird feeling, because with acting, it's just not about me. I love being in that position, because with the music, it's always about me.

Lenny Kravitz

#82. In a funny way, acting, to me, is all make-believe, even if the film has unicorns in it or is a normal movie that can be set in real-life time. I'm still imagining that I'm a different character, so it's all, in a funny way, like fantasy.

Elle Fanning

#83. You're used to having a camera in your face when you're playing a character - it's like having a mask on. But when you have to be you, you're so worried you'll make an idiot of yourself. Acting is a kind of escapism.

Sheridan Smith

#84. To know a person's character you must at least have talked with him, and unless you are gifted with remarkable intuitive insight you are not likely to know much about him unless you have seen him living and acting over a considerable period of time.

Aldous Huxley

#85. I deal in a very artistic way of what interests me and marks my passion, and I try to - whether its good or not - am in love with acting and the stage and characters and the ability to reach and to touch people, so that's where, I guess, that's where my heart will reside, by and large.

Angela Bassett

#86. It's not so much that I'd like to play a raunchy character, but I would like to play someone my own age. I'm always playing down, but I guess it's good because it means I've got a longer life in my acting career.

Julia Sawalha

#87. When I'm composing a scene for the first time, I try to imitate my character. The less critical distance the better - particularly when they're acting badly.

Jonathan Dee

#88. True freedom is the capacity for acting according to one's true character, to be altogether one's self, to be self-determined and not subject to outside coercion.

Corliss Lamont

#89. Acting is about covering up traces of who you are and just being the character. I think it's easier to accept people in roles if you don't know a lot about them.

Peter MacNicol

#90. When I started acting, I made a conscious decision that I wanted to be a character read and not a leading man. I didn't want to do the same thing again and again. I wanted to push and challenge myself. I find and embrace new and unique challenges in all mediums.

Brian J. White

#91. What I learned about acting is that you become the character, like I became 'Timothy Green.'

CJ Adams

#92. I have quite a rich inner life, and I'm constantly looking for a way to express that. I haven't found it yet in acting. When you're playing a character, you're only going to find outlets for very specific parts of your inner world.

Daniel Radcliffe

#93. That's what I love about acting, you get to find little pieces of yourself in every character you play.

Julianna Margulies

#94. Elinor placed all that was astonishing in this way of acting to his mother's account; and it was happy for her that he had a mother whose character was so imperfectly known to her, as to be the general excuse for every thing strange on the part of her son.

Jane Austen

#95. One of the most precious parts of acting is the work before you show up on the set, the time you spend being with your character before you bring that character to life. To me, that's the most rewarding part of it all. It feels very good to show up on a set just knowing that's with you.

Zoe McLellan

#96. Acting has always been something I've wanted to get into. I think the best models are actors; you're taking on a character. In that sense, I have been acting for a long time. It didn't seem like a crazy transition.

Liberty Ross

#97. What's the best part of acting? It's the indescribable feeling of being someone you are and someone your not, all at the same time. Acting is finding a character that's in you, forgetting yourself, and then bringing out this whole other person. Character is all that matters when you're on a stage.

Chris Coppernoll

#98. I want to establish a wide range and play all kinds of parts. It's that sort of acting career I really respect. I like to turn a sharp left from whatever I've done before because that keeps me awake. That's why I want to be an actor - I don't want to play endless variations on one character.

Tim Curry

#99. I really think that studying theater early on really helped me to be able to identify how to get into a character, because it's such a mysterious thing. Learning objective acting in the beginning of my career was the best thing I could have ever done.

Sufe Bradshaw

#100. I personally like to talk to people when I'm not doing a scene, still acting as if I'm in Gotham when I'm on set because I don't really like to break character, since I sometimes get distracted. I may get distracted when I'm talking to people and having fun; then I have to check myself.

Camren Bicondova