Quotes About Acting Out Of Character

#1. 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

#2. 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

#3. 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

#4. 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

#5. 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

#6. 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

#7. 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

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

Ally Sheedy

#9. 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

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

Hill Harper

#11. 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

#12. 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

#13. 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

#14. 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

#15. 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

#16. 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

#17. 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

#18. 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

#19. 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

#20. 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

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

Henry David Thoreau

#22. I hit the ground running, without a lot of training, so I had to do whatever I could do to survive as a professional, and if that meant being that character 24/7 and acting out, I was going to do that. I lived those characters, I brought them home with me.

Nicolas Cage

#23. Though I thoroughly enjoyed playing crime branch officer Gautam Savant, it drained a lot out of me, too. It shook my faith in myself, as I explored my hidden side and wondered if I was just acting or using the character as an excuse to vent my mean side.

Randeep Hooda

#24. In the acting community in New York we call 'Law & Order' 'grad school,' because everyone eventually does a 'Law & Order.' My first one was in 1995, which was a year after I got out of school. Matthew Blanchard was the character's name.

Dallas Roberts

#25. I haven't purposefully set out to play heroes. I'm interested in playing the character who finds himself in extraordinary circumstances. But he's really either just saving himself or acting in the service of something that's important to him.

Harrison Ford

#26. In many ways, acting is really like a science to me to figure out the human behavior of any character that I'm playing.

Pauley Perrette

#27. In acting, you have a writer, a director, a character - you're working through being another person - and the irony I always tell people is when I acted early on as a teenager, it actually kept me out of trouble.

Juliette Lewis

#28. We are playwrights in that we spontaneously compose and direct dialogue, acting out various roles of a nurturer, an authority, or a character from a client's life.

Jeffrey A. Kottler

#29. One of the great pleasures of acting is surrendering to someone else's point of view of the world - living inside a character and a story that never would have come out of your mind or heart.

Brit Marling

#30. Improvisation is a weird word because we often think it means that you make things up out of whole cloth right there on the spot, and that's rarely the case in acting. You have to know who the character is, what the situation is and what is needed.

Roger Ebert

#31. I've always remembered something Sanford Meisner, my acting teacher, told us. When you create a character, it's like making a chair, except instead of making someting out of wood, you make it out of yourself. That's the actor's craft - using yourself to create a character.

Robert Duvall

#32. 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

#33. I get some acting jobs. I like it other than the constant slipping in and out of character.

Andy Kindler

#34. The toughest part of acting is never a single thing. It's more like a whole character. I find film really difficult - trying to make it feel like a consistent character when you're filming everything out of order.

Carey Mulligan

#35. In my acting, I have to identify with something in the character. The big tough boy on the side of right - that's me. Simple themes. Same me from the nuances. All I do is sell sincerity and I've been selling the hell out of that ever since I started.

John Wayne

#36. It was great for that to be my first movie with such a wonderful cast, and such a huge movie. And now I get to do The Fighting Temptations, which is coming out soon-it wasn't much of a character, it was more of a real person, so I got to show more of my acting range.

Beyonce Knowles

#37. Seriously, my music really does help my acting, and, like, getting in and out of a character from a different lifestyle and writing a song about it. Likewise, my acting inspires the music because I can write a theme that I wouldn't necessarily approach at all in life.

Bryan Greenberg

#38. The hardest thing about movie acting is that if you're playing a character who changes within the movie, you've got to do that, but you've got to do it out of sequence, because we never have gotten to shoot in sequence, and that's really, really tough.

John Sayles

#39. 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

#40. 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

#41. 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

#42. 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

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

John Leguizamo

#44. 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

#45. 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

#46. 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

#47. 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

#48. 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

#49. 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

#50. 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

#51. 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

#52. 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

#53. 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

#54. 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

#55. 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

#56. 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

#57. 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

#58. 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

#59. 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

#60. 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

#61. 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

#62. 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

#63. 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

#64. 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

#65. 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

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

Kirk Douglas

#67. 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

#68. 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

#69. 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

#70. 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

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

Denzel Whitaker

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

David Crabb

#73. 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

#74. 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

#75. 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

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

Michael Shurtleff

#77. 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

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

Kevin Hart

#79. 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

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

John Larroquette

#81. 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

#82. 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