Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I always end up taking people that are morally ambiguous.
My limits are limitless. I find my limits every time I act.
Every time I do a movie, I think it's going to be a huge hit.
I don't think actors should have to do anything but come in and act.
I avoid watching other people's versions of films or plays that I work on.
Everyone covering 'Stage Beauty' asks me: 'What's it like to wear a dress?'
Acting is an expression of imagination. No firsthand knowledge is necessary.
I wish I had more of the hero gene, but I don't think I'd be very good at playing one.
I don't want to expose the intricacies of my work so people can understand how I did it.
I am not the most objective viewer of my own work. So I have different thoughts about my work.
Los Angeles doesn't have as vital a theatre as New York does. And that's something that really interests me.
I confess, I'm one of those actors who finds it incredibly hard to divorce myself and my performance from the work itself.
From here on out, I am only interested in what is real. Real people, real feelings, that's it. That's all I'm interested in.
All you really have when you're acting is the confidence and your ability to manage and tell a story by creating a character.
I wish I could say that when I didn't agree with a director I defer to him, but I think sometimes I'm a little self-righteous.
A man tells his stories so many times that he becomes the stories. They live on after him, and in that way he becomes immortal.
I feel the film companies should pay for proper advertising to see that the movie will sell, instead of putting it on our backs.
If I had done 'Titanic,' it would have made, probably, $200,000 - worldwide. So I think my life would have been very, very similar.
It's not that I don't want to be famous. It's just that I don't feel like the burden of responsibility on selling a film should be on the actors.
I've been really lucky; I've had the opportunity to play so many roles. I can't imagine a more fortunate career for an actor. I feel incredibly lucky.
That's what I always enjoyed about acting, the real adrenalin rush. My heart - still before I go on stage - crashing out of my chest. That's thrilling to me.
I do the best I can when I'm accepting the role to say, 'This is about as much as I can do, and if that's not suitable for you, then you should hire somebody else.'
The characters that I'm typically drawn to are sensitive men who are experiencing some sense of identity crisis or growth in their life that they don't know how to overcome.
Interest in certain themes doesn't mandate a personal stake or personal experience of those themes. I've killed people in plays, but no one asks me what it's like to kill people.
I have never indulged our society's misguided notion that my personal life is relevant to my work, so any reporting surrounding that is necessarily hearsay, speculation or fantasy.
You have to deal with rejection at every stage, whether you audition for the part and don't get it, you get the part and it gets terrible reviews, or it gets great reviews but then nobody sees it.
Being fired is something... You have to really want to be an actor after you go through something like that. Because the level of self-doubt and insecurity that creeps into your psyche is monumental.
The truth is I don't think actors should have to do anything but come in and act. I feel the film companies should pay for proper advertising to see that the movie will sell instead of putting it on our backs.
I put a lot of time and energy and thought behind what I do and the characters that I create, and I don't want to do anything peripheral that is going to make an audience see me up there on the screen rather than who I'm playing.
I live in New York City. I'm 5-foot-9 and wear Rockport shoes that make me 5-foot-91/2. They're not lifts - I deny that - but they do set off the airport metal detector. My hair is starting to gray a little. I have a gold tooth in the back.
I never felt that I was typecast, but I was concerned about it. I certainly made an effort to take as many parts in theater and film that resisted that. If you only learn how to act a certain kind of role, it is very difficult to grow as an actor.
My parents were really encouraging. But I had to teach them the proper way you respond to an actor after seeing a play - regardless of whether you like their performance you tell them how great they are because they have to go on again the next night.
One of the great tools we use in acting is the idea of immediacy, that the audience gets to see you witness something apparently for the first time, so you create a lot of tools to kind of trick yourself into making it appear something is happening for the first time.
You can find the richness in any moment, even the most seemingly bleak. To try to do a movie about that was a joyful experience. So actually, it was really the context of it that made the experience so worthwhile, rather than the actual subject matter, if that makes sense.
I think one of the things that people take for granted when they watch a film is the actors have to exhibit an extraordinary amount of force to block out the stuff that isn't a part of their reality. And when the audience sees it, they're seeing everything the actor isn't seeing.
When somebody on a professional scale says "you did it wrong," it has a pretty intense impact. If you don't have some kind of opposing force to say, "that's all right, that's their opinion," or, "I may have screwed that one up but I'll do better the next time," then you're screwed.
You have to let go of stuff when you act for a while. You stay too attached to things that have worked or haven't worked, it kind of makes it harder for you to move forward. So I try to concentrate on the experience that I have and then let the public expression of it be its own deal.
One of the difficulties you run into is that acting and celebrity are so closely intertwined. People make careers out of being charismatic personalities. It's one of those things that people have come to expect from actors. Personalities that don't change from role to role. I don't want it that way.
There's exceptional work being done on television. Some of our great writers are writing for television. When you have things to choose from, you typically go after the writing - unless you're going after the money. There are fewer opportunities in film to make money with good writing, unless you're an action hero.
I went to acting school, and there were twenty other actors in my class who were exceptional. It's hard for anybody to get work. When I was trying to get jobs, I felt a responsibility to be respectful of the opportunities and take challenging things that could be interesting both for me as an actor and for the audience.
One of the things an actor tries to access is immediacy, so that you feel like you're experiencing it for the first time. But when you're playing a character who knows what's going to happen and can't stop himself to reacting although he knows he can't stop himself from reacting, there's a whole separate set of things to consider.
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.
When you get many opportunities early on, and you have people who have been working for a while counting on you, you have to at least pretend that you know what you're doing. So any actor that's pretending, you start to develop philosophies. Without years and years of experience, you kind of go with an attitude that you know what you're doing. And so I think right around that time, I was kind of at the peak of rigidly thinking that I knew how to work in film in a way that I wanted to. Cameron was extremely patient and generous with me.
When you're in pajamas that are sagging in the ass because you've got a battery pack that's weighing them down, and covered in 2,000 LEDs, and your face has 150 black dots on it, and you're probably standing in six-inch heels, it is a big challenge to imagine that you're the master of the universe when the rest of your cast members are laughing their ass off at you. So there's no question that there was a very difficult task that I had, but it wasn't living up to somebody else's expectations of the story. I was just trying to do the screenplay that was written.