actors Quotes

I always tell actors, \'Don't think of it as unemployment when you don't have a job. You have to think of it as being in preparation for your next job.\' You have to be always preparing for success.

Comedy is serious - deadly serious. Never, never try to be funny! The actors must be serious. Only the situation must be absurd. Funny is in the writing, not in the performing. If the situation isn't absurd, no amount of joke will help.

Character actors just pile up the credits because you work on a movie for like a few days. It's not like I'm the lead in everything I do - far from it. I'm not spending three or four months on a picture; I'm spending three or four weeks. Sometimes three or four days.

Anyone who thinks impressions of old movie actors is funny absolutely cannot be trusted. I think it's like a law of nature.

We're all unique as actors. To yourself, you are unique, you have to think 'I'm me, I'm not going to bunch myself with other people.' Agents and producers have to get you into a box, to accommodate their limited imaginations.

John Doyle just knows how to feed actors, and what comes out of us, good, bad, right, wrong, doesn't matter. There's no fear or censure. He opens up the creative goo and all of the actor vessel stuff. He knows how to do it. It's just incredible.

You know for years before the notion of sequels, actors were the franchise. John Wayne would rarely do sequels, but he kind of played the same guy with a different name in every movie. I have no problem with using actors as franchises. And that's what is fun to do.

Thank you to my wonderful actors, the triangle of man-love which is Colin Firth, Geoffrey Rush and me.

Because ultimately only the witness -- and not the actors -- knows the truth (Vyasa to Draupadi)

I don't know if there's an actors' slow-pitch softball league I could join. My agency has a team, but they say it would be a conflict of interest for the people they rep to play because I could hit a pop-up and they'd have to drop it on purpose.

I like to direct landscapes just as I like to direct actors and animals.

I think all actors - they'll hate me for saying this - but we are babies. We like to be loved, and we'll do anything if we're loved.

There are certain stars who are not actors. I don't want to be that type.

The joy is when you work with great actors, it just comes to life in a way that you never even imagined.

What great comedians, great comic writers, great comic actors do is that they just read the headlines with the right eyebrow position and it's funny.

As an actor myself, the opportunity to sing and dance and be dramatic and be funny - it's really irresistible to actors. You get to show all sides of your talent.

It's not uncommon to hear people say that the re-entry into their lives is very hard. A lot of actors say that the hardest thing about working is not working, because you go from one of the most structured environments in the world to a place of no structure. Maybe that's why you see someone go from movie to movie to movie.

I am in control of my career, and that's what so many actors don't take advantage of. You get to these successful points, and you continue to just work for other people. But, when you're your own brand and you're your own boss, the whole line of work changes. That's my biggest turn on.

Each of the actors is quite different, but they're all living in the same world.

There's a reason why actors are always dying to work with the Coens. They just set the stage for you to do their best work.

Even on my films, I always collaborate with the actors. That's a given. I think you need that. You need the actors to feel as much ownership of the performance and the direction of the story as you do, to get the most out of everyone's potential.

You don't cast the animal, per se. You have an animal trainer who looks for several of them. That is a different experience than dealing with actors. That is just difficult. It is what you expect from an animal on the set. You just run a lot of film and prompt it to do the right thing, but sit through it doing all the wrong things first. It's just unbelievably boring, frustrating and painstaking to shoot.

It's just an impulse, in some actors. You want to make the audience like you. That's the aim of the exercise.

The actor shouldn't edit themselves or be anxious. And the actors that I admire are always the ones who are inventive and their imaginative life in free-willing. It's a director's job to go, \'No here, don't do that, go there.\'

If you give the actors a problem 'I'm not getting something out of the scene' and it's the writing, we just don't have the scene, if you give them the problem and just give them some key thoughts they can bring some great solutions to the equation too. So if it's just not perfect, or I'm not getting all I can, I'll open it up to them and say let's talk about it.

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.

I'm one of the actors who really enjoys working with kids and animals, which is always a no go. There's something beautiful about it because you tend to forget yourself, as an actor.

A couple of clues came my way of what I might be getting myself into when I sat down with a number of actors who had played Richard III in the past. And I was hoping of course, that one of them or all of them were gonna give me the magic key, the secret way in to play Richard III but none of them did that.But every one of them did say the following, \'Be careful.\'

Actors are actors. They're all buddies. I've done so many movies and TV that you get to be friends with everyone. And the ones you don't get to be friends with, you simply don't work together with them again.

I think the key that differentiates the good actors from the mediocre ones that are still trying to come up, is that the good ones know how to listen. It's like being in a jazz band. They know how to listen to what the other musicians are playing. And where to come in and where to sit out. That's my approach to being in an ensemble cast and working with any kind of actors in a scene.