Bad Acting Quotes & Sayings

Now that I'm more mature, in a funny way, I can even appreciate that I've bad to become more aware of my body. Since I've chosen acting as my career, I have to keep my weight down anyway-I've been used to it for years, so it's no problem. And there's nothing I can't do. — Dana Hill

Acting is a win-win situation. There is no risk involved. That's why I get tired of hearing actors who try to make out that there's a downside to it. Fame is an odd thing. It bugs you a little bit, but it's really not bad. — John Corbett

A bad guy in a movie has a lot of latitude for acting. He can walk up the wall, crawl across the ceiling, go piss in the corner and everybody will say, "Fantastic!" But somebody's going to have to catch that sucker. Somebody's going to have to play the guy who gets him in the end. And that's a better part. — Harrison Ford

All I have to do is be me on stage. But acting, I have to be someone else, and walk how they would walk and blink how they would blink. I used to talk about it bad like, 'Aw man, that person made $10 million a movie?' But now I understand why they do. I get it now. — Jill Scott

Feminism was supposed to chase away all of those embarrassing vulnerabilities. At least, you were supposed to be aware that acting helpless was something shameful. So was the tendency to hide your own fear behind the toughness of bad boys, if you had that. I had that. I'm being honest here. The — Deb Caletti

I don't think the concept of "directing actors" exists in the sense that if you get what you order from an actor you'll always get bad acting. Every actor is scared just like a regular person. — Pirjo Honkasalo

One must know a bad performance to know a good one. You can't be middle-of-the-road about it, just as you can't be middle-of-the-road about life. I mean, you can't say about Hitler, I can take him or leave him. Well, I can't be middle-of-the-road about a performance, especially my own. I feel that if I can vomit at seeing a bad performance, I'm ahead of the game. — Patricia Bosworth

So are we acting like the children of a set apart Creator, or are we acting as though we are the children of a father who left his teenagers home while he went away on a long journey, doing as we see fit in the full eyes of the world who are watching to see if we really are set-apart, or just all talk. They want to see if we hold ourselves to God's standards of what is and is not set apart, clean and unclean, good and bad. They want to see if we are really the Children of the Most High. — Tyler Dawn Rosenquist

Most actors want the audience to like them, and that leads to bad acting. — Lee Daniels

War as a moral metaphor is limited, limiting, and dangerous. By reducing the choices of action to "a war against" whatever-it-is, you divide the world into Me or Us (good) and Them or It (bad) and reduce the ethical complexity and moral richness of our life to Yes/No, On/Off. This is puerile, misleading, and degrading. In stories, it evades any solution but violence and offers the reader mere infantile reassurance. All too often the heroes of such fantasies behave exactly as the villains do, acting with mindless violence, but the hero is on the "right" side and therefore will win. Right makes might. — Ursula K. Le Guin

The argument that 'boys will be boys' actually carries the profoundly anti-male implication that we should expect bad behavior from boys and men. The assumption is that they are somehow not capable of acting appropriately, or treating girls and women with respect. — Jackson Katz

Quit acting like everything is so serious. Most situations aren't as bad as you fear, and those that are might benefit from a little laughter. — Richelle E. Goodrich

Darling, don't be silly, your whole future is ahead of you. All you have to do is go out there and ask for a part- something small and reasonable just to start with. From there, no one can stop you. Don't feel bad about anything you've done, and for God's sake, have fun. — Anna Godbersen

is not good for one's morals to see bad acting. Besides, — Oscar Wilde

I have an appreciation for what some people would call "bad acting," but which I think can be much more real than the overly emotive, technical and supposedly "realistic" acting that is so prevalent in mainstream cinema. — Bruce LaBruce

Bad acting, like bad writing, has a remarkable uniformity, whether seen on the French, German, or English stages; it all seems modeled after two or three types, and those the least like types of good acting. The fault generally lies less in the bad imitation of a good model, than in the successful imitation of a bad model. — George Henry Lewes

The traveler may feel assured, he will meet with no difficulties or dangers, excepting in rare cases, nearly so bad as he beforehand anticipates. In a moral point of view, the effect ought to be, to teach him good-humored patience, freedom from selfishness, the habit of acting for himself, and of making the best of every occurrence. — Charles Darwin

I guess once you've been acting for a long time, you glean the great bits of good directors and the bad bits from other directors, and you know the way that you would like to be directed. — Luke Evans

Acting is playing pretend, playing a children's game at an adult level, but with children's rules. It's fun to play bad guys. I've never been in a fight in my life, so it's fun to play something that's different. — Ray Liotta

I'm a theater actress and I thrive on working with other actors, and you can't be even a smidge bad, when you're acting with Charlie [Sheen]. He's just so natural, so present and so good that you have to step up to his level, or else. — Daniela Bobadilla

I think sometimes soap acting gets an unfair label for being bad and over the top. The lessons I learned there were so valuable. Seeing yourself every day on television, you learned what worked and didn't work, what was bad acting and what wasn't. Memorizing scripts became second nature. — Dylan Bruce

You two have a bad habit of acting like fools and calling it heroic. — Leigh Bardugo

For some reason I didn't believe it. I don't know why. Maybe it was because my father was the kind of person who told himself things over and over until he believed them, who could justify almost anything. What I wanted was for it to really be okay. I wanted him to really not care, to maybe even be happy about it. Instead he was acting like I was making a bad career choice, like I was passing up an English degree at Fairmont in favor of a bartending certificate at the local community college. — Nick Burd

As we try to learn from the past, we form patterns of thinking based on our experiences, not realizing that the things that happened have an unfair advantage over the things that didn't. In other words, we can't see the alternatives that might well have happened if not for some small chance event. When a bad thing happens, people will draw conclusions that might include conspiracy or forces acting against them or, conversely, if a good thing happens, that they are brilliant and deserving. But these kinds of misperceptions ultimately deceive us. And this has consequences in business - and for the way we manage. — Ed Catmull

Don't stink up the place with bad acting, if an opportunity comes your way. — Edie McClurg

Do you feel no compunction, Socrates, at having followed a line of action which puts you in danger of the death penalty?'
I might fairly reply to him, 'You are mistaken, my friend, if you think that a man who is worth anything ought to spend his time weighing up the prospects of life and death. He has only one thing to consider in performing any action
that is, whether he is acting rightly or wrongly, like a good man or a bad one. — Socrates

Acting is bad acting if the actor himself gets emotional in the act of making the audience cry. The object is to make the audience cry, but not cry yourself. The emotion has to be inside the actor, not outside. If you stand there weeping and wailing, all your emotions will go down your shirt and nothing will go out to your audience. Audience control is really about the actor — Rex Harrison

What in the seven hells do you think you're doing?" Lock shoved his brother up against the wall of the guest suite they were staying in and glared into Deep's bottomless black eyes. "Why are you acting this way? Are you trying to scare her off?" Deep laughed harshly and brushed off his brother's hands. "As if we had a shot with her. Did you see those curves? She's fucking gorgeous - an elite." "We're not bad looking," Lock objected. "I've heard Earth females find our kind attractive." "The other Kindred races, maybe. But not the Twin Kindred. We scare them, Lock. The idea of one woman with two males at once frightens them out of their skulls." "They can't all be scared - there are plenty of Twin Kindred with brides aboard the Mother ship." "Not nearly as many as Beast Kindred and Blood Kindred. Why don't you just face it, brother? Calling an Earth female as a bride is a bad idea." "You — Evangeline Anderson

I was a bad student. I liked archaeology actually, I was interested in maybe becoming an archaeologist but I was such a bad student and had such bad grades that I wasn't going to get into any really good college so I fell back on acting. — Ben Stiller

It's no use to go and take courses in playwriting any more than it's much use taking courses in acting. Better play to a bad matinee in Hull - it will teach you much more than a year of careful instruction. Come to think of it, I never did play to a good matinee in Hull ... — Noel Coward

All that day it seemed to her as though she were acting in a theater with actors cleverer than she, and that her bad acting was spoiling the whole performance. She had come with the intention of staying two days, if all went well. But in the evening, during the game, she made up her mind that she would go home next day. — Leo Tolstoy

Acting for me is not a bad habit like smoking that I must make an effort to quit. I love acting; I love directing. — Joan Chen

Act'. How many good people do you really know? I discount those who mouth out platitudes for the edification of the young, and who truly are 'good', whatever that means?"
What a strange subject, and from such a strange person!"Everyone I know is a mixture, some with more good than bad, and it varies on different days, — Sherwood Smith

Sometimes acting and politics make a very bad combination. I think that sometimes people take me less seriously in my work for the UN because I am an actor. — Angelina Jolie

When you do a four-camera sitcom, everything is a little schtickier. It's not necessarily that you pick up bad habits, but there is just a very specific way of acting that you fall into on those kinds of multicamera shows, and you have to break those habits when you go in to do other things. — Mila Kunis

No one will die because of bad acting. No one will die because you missed a cue. We're all human beings. If mistakes are made, you figure out that you're going to live. — Kate Baldwin

It's bad writing, however naturalistic it's written, that's where you have to do your best acting. — Adam Brody

With the best intentions, the job of acting can become a display of accumulated bad habits, trapped instincts and blocked energies. Working with the Alexander Technique has given me sightings of another way ... Mind and body, work and life together. Real imaginative freedom ... — Alan Rickman

We had generals who were admirals and admirals who wanted to be generals. Generals acting as admirals are bad enough, but it was the admirals who wanted to be generals who imperiled victory among the coral islands. — Holland Smith

Just because we're on schedule is no reason to shoot bad acting. Someone once said to me, 'You're inconsiderate.' And I said, 'Inconsiderate? Bad acting is the ultimate inconsideration.' It's a collective slap to a million faces at the same time. — Debra Winger

Idleness does drive me crazy, but I'd rather read or write than do anything just to work. A kind of respect has been instilled in me for acting: I love it too much to ever have a bad relationship with it. — Karen Allen

Our everyday self is a narrow construct ... Our total self is far broader, ultimately infinite. Actors who seem to be playing themselves are actually playing roles they have become so skillful at that they seem pure and natural ... Much bad Acting is the result of being too close to the Actor's everyday self, confining him in its rigid mold. — Richard Hornby

A person who is good for anything ought not to calculate the chance of living or dying; he or she ought only to consider whether in doing anything he or she is doing right or wrong- acting the part of a good person or a bad person. — Plato

When outsiders claim that we are unchristian, it is a reflection of this jumbled (and predominately negative) set of perceptions. When they see Christians not acting like Jesus, they quickly conclude that the group deserves an unchristian label. Like a corrupted computer file or a bad photocopy, Christianity, they say, is no longer in pure form, and so they reject it. One quarter of outsiders say therefore most perception of Christianity is that the faith has changed for the worse. It has gotten off-track and is not what Christ intended. Modern-day Christianity no longer seems Christian. — David Kinnaman

I mean one of the basic rules when you're acting is that you mustn't stand in judgement on a character, you mustn't say Hitler was a bad man because you can't act in that way. — Janet Suzman

Every soul is special. They're all beautiful. They're all far more significant than anyone on this rock realizes. I think when people are at their best, they're acting in accordance with their soul. The ones who have gone bad don't have bad souls. They've just given up on keeping in touch with them. — Jim Butcher

In a movie, you need good actors, whereas in a book, you don't, unless you have a really bad imagination. In a book, your imagination will do the acting for you. Also, the process of revelation is often different. Tension is achieved in a different way. — Yann Martel

In the past, when people criticized me for asking unexpected questions, I felt ashamed. Now I realize that normal people are acting in a superficial and often false manner. So rather than let them make me feel bad, I express my annoyance. It's my way of trying to strike a blow for logic and rationality. — John Elder Robison

My dad always said he wanted to be remembered for his body of work, and he's made more than 75 pictures, some good, some bad, and they will be his legacy to the world of acting. — Charlton Heston

If you think that a man who is any good at all should take into account the risk of life or death; he should look to this only in his action, whether what he does is right or wrong, whether he is acting life a good or a bad man. — Plato

If my life were still a movie, this is the part that would end up on the cutting room floor. We were all just fill-ins for a long-running soap opera. The actors changed, but the story seldom did. Certainly not the action. — Charles Martin

In musical performances one can sense that the person on stage is having a good time even if they're singing a song about breaking up or being in a bad way. For an actor this would be anathema, it would destroy the illusion, but with singing one can have it both ways. As a singer, you can be transparent and reveal yourself on stage, in that moment, and at the same time be the person whose story is being told in the song. Not too many kinds of performance allow that. — David Byrne

The big turning point came when I played in the pit orchestra for a production of SWEENEY TODD and I spent most of the time watching the play instead of playing the score! And that's when I knew I had it bad for acting. — John Cariani

Politicians are usually the first to forget that if you assume someone else is acting in bad faith, they will do the same to you. Questioning motives poisons the well. — John Sununu

When I used to wrestle professionally, I preferred being the bad guy known as 'The Heel;' you would get to 'work the crowd,' getting them to hate you and want to see you lose, while the good guy 'Babyface' would walk in, smile and shake hands with a few kids, and his acting job was done. — Conan Stevens

If you're not in someone's face, they're not going to remember you. So get yourself back into an acting class; get a coach. Do those things you did when you were 20 and wanted it so bad. — Jake Busey

If you make a mistake, admit it. Any attempt at cover-up will ultimately backfire. At some level the patient will sense you are acting in bad faith, and therapy will suffer. Furthermore, an open admission of error is good model-setting for patients and another sign that they matter to you. — Irvin D. Yalom

Stories don't teach us to be good; it isn't as simple as that. They show us what it feels like to be good, or to be bad. They show us people like ourselves doing right things and wrong things, acting bravely or acting meanly, being cruel or being kind, and they leave it up to our own powers of empathy and imagination to make the connection with our own lives. Sometimes we do, sometimes we don't. It isn't like putting a coin in a machine and getting a chocolate bar; we're not mechanical, we don't respond every time in the same way ...
The moral teaching comes gently, and quietly, and little by little, and weighs nothing at all. We hardly know it's happening. But in this silent and discreet way, with every book we read and love, with every story that makes its way into our heart, we gradually acquire models of behaviour and friends we admire and patterns of decency and kindness to follow.
Philip Pullman from his Award Lecture, Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award Recipient 2005 — Philip Pullman

I don't think my acting was ever bad; I always knew that I could do it. But when you go to audition for a drama, they're very serious in the room, and I was used to being kind of goofy and having small talk. — Mary Lynn Rajskub

A good change leader never thinks, "Why are these people acting so badly? They must be bad people." A change leader thinks, "How can I set up a situation that brings out the good in these people? — Chip Heath

Bad acting comes in many bags, various odors. It can be performed by cardboard refugees from an Ed Wood movie, reciting their dialogue off an eye chart, or by hopped-up pros looking to punch a hole through the fourth wall from pure ballistic force of personality, like Joe Pesci in a bad mood. I can respect bad acting that owns its own style. — James Wolcott

There's good movies and there's bad movies. The genres are never dead, it's just about how to apply them and articulate them and execute them - the story, the quality of the writing, the acting, the design elements, the directorial execution - all these things make it what it is. — Andy Garcia

It's much harder to act in a bad film than in a good one. A terrible script makes for very difficult acting. You can win an Academy Award for some of the easiest acting in your career, made possible by a brilliant script. — Michael Caine

I am just a middle-class farm boy from Dodge City and my grandparents were wheat farmers. I thought painting, acting, directing and photography were all part of being an artist. I have made my money that way. And I have had some fun. It's not been a bad life. — Dennis Hopper

I miss Texas so bad. That's the hard part about being out here in L.A., trying to pursue acting and music and lighting and production and stuff. It takes a lot of time out from your personal life, and I can only get back to Texas three times a year at most. It's tough. — Jackson Rathbone

I'm going with Charlotte Rampling. In 45 Years [movie], you start out feeling so bad for her, and then it kind of shifts. I don't know how long you have to act to be able to say everything when you say nothing. The acting feels so real. It's not a fluke that a movie that probably no one's heard of, an actress performance comes out of it. — Bun B.

Acting never was about the money for me ... Maybe in 10 years, I'll be able to appreciate the fact that I am financially stable and independent and I don't have to make bad choices. I can be very picky. — Emma Watson

Hope doesn't come from calculating whether the good news is winning out over the bad. Its simply a choice to take action. — Anna Lappe

Acting is a really strange thing. You have to know when you're put in a bad situation, but you also have to be willing to do something very strange. — Alexandra Daddario

No one ever let me be a bad guy once I started working more frequently after I got out of college and started pursuing acting. I just got all of the good-guy roles because if I walk in the room, not a lot of people believe me as a bad guy. — Tom Everett Scott

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

Hurt people hurt people. We are not being judgmental by separating ourselves from such people. But we should do so with compassion. Compassion is defined as a "keen awareness of the suffering of another coupled with a desire to see it relieved." People hurt others as a result of their own inner strife and pain. Avoid the reactive response of believeing they are bad; they already think so and are acting that way. They aren't bad; they are damaged and they deserve compassion. Note that compassion is an internal process, an understanding of the painful and troubled road trod by another. It is not trying to change or fix that person. — Will Bowen

I've never agreed with the conventional wisdom that 'actors are great liars.' If more people understood the acting process, the goals of good actors, the conventional wisdom would be 'actors are terrible liars,' because only bad actors lie on the job. The good ones hate fakery and avoid manufactured emotion at all costs. Any script is enough of a lie anyway. (What experience does any actor have with flying a spacecraft? Killing someone?) What's called for, what actors are hired for, is to bring reality to the arbitrary. — Rob Lowe

Acting is everything to me and it's at the core of every decision. Whatever importance costumes, details, lights, camera, dialogue and everything else have, if the acting is bad, cheap, or overdone everything else is just gone. — Xavier Dolan

The past has given us much too many bad answers for us not to see that the mistakes were in the questions themselves. There is no need to choose between the fetishism of spontaneity and the organization control; between the "come one, come all" of activist networks and the discipline of hierarchy; between acting desperately now and waiting desperately for later; between bracketing that which is to be lived and experimented in the name of paradise that seems more and more like a hell the longer it is put off and flogging the dead horse of how planting carrots is enough to leave this nightmare. — The Invisible Committee

It is not good for one's morals to see bad acting — Oscar Wilde

I just let the work speak for itself. An actor is not afraid to take risks; to put on different hats; to be a good guy, a bad guy, a victim, an abuser. There are all kinds of people in the world, and playing them is what acting is all about. — Kevin Bacon

Acting like everyone who's been successful is bad and because you're rich you're bad, I don't understand it, — Jamie Dimon

You must make, always. You must act, if you believe something. Talking about acting is like boasting about pictures you're going to paint. The most terrible bad form. — John Fowles

Believe me, when an actress is told that her very name is synonymous with bad acting, she's had it. — Piper Laurie

Personally I don't believe in bad people. I think there's always a reason for people acting badly. — Bill Skarsgard

I originally envisioned myself doing something with the suffix 'ology' at the end of it, like marine biology or entomology. But after I started to do some acting gigs, I thought it wasn't a bad thing ... I said to myself, 'I might as well keep riding this bus until the wheels fall off.' — Callan McAuliffe

In my opinion, if you want to pursue an art, especially acting, you have to be really perceptive of what people go through. There is so much bad in the world, and I think that acting it out and exploring it almost helps you deal with it. — Rita Volk

The biggest mistake in student films is that they are usually cast so badly, with friends and people the directors know. Actually you can cover a lot of bad direction with good acting. — Brian De Palma

Yes, I did try acting when I was in high school and I was terrible at it. So I definitely have had the experience of being bad at artistic endeavor. — Dana Spiotta

I think you are a very good tiger," said Dorothy, patting the huge head of the beast. "In that you are mistaken," was the reply. "I am a good beast, perhaps, but a disgracefully bad tiger. For it is the nature of tigers to be cruel and ferocious, and in refusing to eat harmless living creatures I am acting as no good tiger has ever before acted. That is why I left the forest and joined my friend the Cowardly Lion. — L. Frank Baum

I can't say that I haven't done some bad acting in my time. I have. Usually that involves what we actors call 'indicating,' when you twirl your mustache. — Billy Campbell

Grief is not linear. People kept telling me that once this happened or that passed, everything would be better. Some people gave me one year to grieve. They saw grief as a straight line, with a beginning, middle, and end. But it is not linear. It is disjointed. One day you are acting almost like a normal person. You maybe even manage to take a shower. Your clothes match. You think the autumn leaves look pretty, or enjoy the sound of snow crunching under your feet. Then a song, a glimpse of something, or maybe even nothing sends you back into the hole of grief. It is not one step forward, two steps back. It is a jumble. It is hours that are all right, and weeks that aren't. Or it is good days and bad days. Or it is the weight of sadness making you look different to others and nothing helps. — Ann Hood

Present injustices exist not so much because simple individuals are acting in bad faith or lacking in charity, but because huge, impersonal systems (that seem beyond the control of the individuals acting within them) disprivilege some even as they unduly privilege others. — Ronald Rolheiser

The art of acting is not to act. Once you show them more, what you show them, in fact is bad acting. — Anthony Hopkins

I knew that I wanted to be an actor. Then it became about whether acting wanted me. So, I gave it a shot. It hasn't worked out too bad, so far. — Laura San Giacomo

I definitely support cop acting more than cops, but all of them ain't bad, just some of them. — Ice Cube

Faked enthusiasm is worse than bad acting - it is bad acting with the intent to deceive. — Bo Bennett

Yes, my buggy is outside and my horse has been acting up. I wondered if you could come rub its skull and tell me if it's got a bad case of stubborn, or if it might be indigestion? — Regina Jennings

It's easy for me to play bad guys because it's a very linear acting. Bad guys aren't empathetic. Being a bad guy is great because you're not friendly and you don't have to do much with your face. — Henry Rollins

Bad acting is the ultimate inconsideration. — Debra Winger

Strangely, when I was a kid, my first acting job, at 5 years old, was a performance of 'The Three Little Pigs.' They cast me as the Big Bad Wolf. — William Zabka

The Titans knew the abominations we would become. The horrific deeds we would commit. All the ways we would go on to abuse our creations. They'd tried to end our existence, to stop us, and in return we orchestrated their murder. We'd killed our parents. And then we created a species in our image, acting surprised when they spent every waking moment improving upon their methods of murder and mass destruction. We did that. We made them sadistic and twisted and broken. We were gods. Every bad thing that had ever happened lay at our feet. There was no one else to blame. — Kaitlin Bevis

How do you know this?
Because I'm always watching people. When I watch people I too look through them. I learned that from my mother. To glance is not enough; eyes and brains together, acting like a flock of ravenous birds, flapping, tearing, poking ... I know everything about people when I look at them for only a moment. I can tell from their clothes, their walks, their hair and hands, I know all the bad things that they've done. I know how they've failed and how they will fail and how miserable they are. — Dave Eggers

After I began to make some money, my brain-damaged accountant put me in one business after another that went bad. The only one that panned out was a small bank, an old Scottish firm with London offices in Pall Mall. I was a director. We sold out to a larger bank. That was the only successful venture I've had, apart from acting. — Sean Connery