Quotes & Sayings About Play Acting

A radio play actually ended up being the first acting job I ever had. A lot of times when I'm on camera, I'm playing characters that are more like myself, and I don't get to do a lot of real character work. But when you're doing animation, you are the very epitome of colorful characters. I think I'm just really into make believe. — Virginia Madsen

I mean I don't think it got me interested in acting. I think it might be what makes it so that I can have the idea of the variety of people in the world, different incomes. That helps. When you're going to play someone it's interesting and nice to see experiences that aren't like yours. But there's always the remarkable similarity of all people. — Peter Sarsgaard

For the fist time since she'd met him five years ago, Zander Duffield looked like a child acting the role of a Titan in a school play
instead of the Titan he actually was. — Suzanne Stroh

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

Whatever it is, if you draw, you paint, you're a carpenter, you play football, the more you do it, you're a journalist, the more stories you write, the more people you interview and navigate your way through these different personalities to get your story, the better you're going to get at it. Acting's no different. — Tom Sizemore

I pretty much spent my twenties as a musician and taking acting classes. I loved it. I was at UCLA getting As and Bs in English and creative writing, basically trying to stay out of the Army. All I really wanted to do was play music. — Robert David Hall

I think the beauty of working with young people is they remind you of the spirit of acting and it's just a big play. — Eric Bana

Listen, if I can manage it, I'll try to swing home this afternoon for a bit. To - I don't know - help you out or something."
His smile was warm and gorgeous. "See there. You're acting like a wife."
"Shut up."
"I like it," he said, backing her against the door. "Quite a bit. Next thing I know you'll be down in the kitchen, baking."
"Next thing you know I'll be kicking your ass, and you'll be the one who needs round-the-clock care."
"Can we play doctor? — J.D. Robb

I fell in love with acting at around the age of 11, when I was drafted in to play a fairy at an amateur production of 'Midsummer Night's Dream.' — Zoe Tapper

It's interesting how you can blur the line between acting and living and learn from your performances. I'm just trying to keep learning as much as I can and not get caught up in all the distractions that can play havoc with your mind. — Kristen Stewart

I'm definitely not a dancer. I can move well, but it's more about the acting and the singing for me. Acting and singing are completely different, so I can't say which one I love better because I love them both. I love acting because I get to play different characters. But I also love my music because I get to portray me. — Vanessa Hudgens

It's much harder to play beloved than to play a rotten guy. Rotten guy is a piece of cake. So playing a beloved person really sets a high bar for your behavior and your acting and what you project. — Bill Murray

Yeah, I think that a play is a huge commitment, and I think that what it requires of you is a lot, so it really makes you dig in and find things, and it just makes you sharp, 'cause it's live. Really, to me, it separates the men from the boys. I always say it's like the frontlines of acting, when you're on stage. — Yul Vazquez

Some of the newer folks in the industry, I'm not sure they are familiar with the term acting. They don't understand what it means to play a character rather than just be a personality. — Kathleen Quinlan

For me, acting is play. It's just play and it's playing make believe really, really well. — Anson Mount

One day, when I was 33, I shifted. I suddenly saw acting as a higher calling. I understood that my goal was to serve the play. And I realized if an actor can make audiences' hearts resonate or make them question their values - that's an important thing to do! — Laila Robins

If there is any sense of order to the universe, acting is what I am meant to do. I'm not manufactured. I know acting isn't real, that it's temporary. If there is any theme to the roles I play, it is emotional vulnerability and availability. — DJ Qualls

I transitioned into theater and acting when I was about 9, community theater and musicals, being, like, chorus-kid-number-78 or whatever. But I just loved it. As a kid you just crave attention, and early on I just felt it was so cool and fun to play around and have people clap for me. But eventually I grew up and fell deeper into it. — Tatiana Maslany

I feel like my early experiences of acting, and I think a lot of other actors' too, are probably at camp or school plays where you get to have great range. At camp, I remember getting to play a 50-year-old man. — Matt McGorry

Making a film or doing a play are completely different experiences and entirely fulfilling, but completely unique. I also think one complements the other. People often say that theater is about flexing your muscles, and is actually real acting, whereas I sort of disagree. — Eddie Redmayne

The most important thing to having a long career, as an actor, is diversity and being able to play different types of characters in different types of movies. I want to keep acting, all my life. In order to do that, I think it is important to go and do the bigger tentpole box office movies, and then also do more character roles. — Josh Hutcherson

Acting with Denzel is like playing tennis with someone that's better than you. You either play better tennis or get blown off the court. — Dean Cain

Movie acting is harder than doing a play. You have to be entertaining but completely natural, like Jimmy Stewart and Cary Grant. They weren't doing anything. Do you have any idea how hard that is? That's how good they were. It's crazy hard to be convincing and real. It's the most subtle, hardest thing there is. — Jon Lovitz

There are plenty of actors who've caught the singing bug and vice versa, but with musical performers, you're constantly a persona - which is something I love about acting: you play a character, you leave and you get to be yourself again. — Freddie Stroma

When it comes to our Constitution, judges perform, certainly, an important role. But the people, acting through their elected representatives, should play an even more important role. — Mike DeWine

A few moments after he found himself on the stage amid the garish gas and the dim scenery, acting before the innumerable faces of the void. It surprised him to see that the play which he had known at rehearsals for a disjointed lifeless thing had suddenly assumed a life of its own. It seemed now to play itself, he and his fellow actors aiding it with their parts. When the curtain fell on the last scene he heard the void filled with applause and, through a rift in a side scene, saw the simple body before which he had acted magically deformed, the void of faces breaking at all points and falling asunder into busy groups. — James Joyce

The play was a great success, but the audience was a disaster. — Oscar Wilde

I play guitar and sing when I'm not busy with school and acting. — Kaitlyn Dever

Comedy's my first love. I love that so much. You play comedy in drama, too. The difference between genres doesn't really change the method of acting. — Emma Stone

I just want to keep working, really. I just want to keep acting. Playing one part for a very long time builds up in you a desire to play as many different things as you can. — Daniel Radcliffe

I think the motion picture industry is a stupid business and I despise acting the scenes in short snatches, one at a time. I hate this film work. I am disgusted with myself. On the stage I could never play a part unless I felt it with all my heart and soul. — Conrad Veidt

It was always theater for me. But part of that came out of the fact that I was always acting out as a kid. I was the kid who didn't play well with others. — Chris Eigeman

'SVU' is one of my favorite shows. When I got the call to appear and play myself, I jumped at the chance. Obviously, I went over my lines, but playing yourself is a really great way to get your feet wet in the acting field. I enjoyed being on set and learning as much as I could about the scripted world. — Taylor Hicks

[Constance Bennett] never tired of acting, said Peter Plant. She liked it, she enjoyed it, and she worked very hard at it. When she was making a film, she would really be busy preparing for the next day's scenes. I would visit her for half an hour, and then she would go back to her script. She had what her father had, a photographic memory. Richard Bennett, I understand, could read a play through once, and he knew the whole play, and everyone else's cues. I have the good fortune to have inherited that, and it's made many people think me more intelligent than I am. — Eve Golden

I'm lucky that I got to start acting when I was so young, and people put me in these movies. A lot of people don't get to play these parts because they start a little older. — Nat Wolff

Twenty years earlier, in a life [Kirsten] mostly couldn't remember, she had had a small nonspeaking role in a short-lived Toronto production of King Lear. Now she walked in sandals whose soles had been cut from an automobile tire, three knives in her belt. — Emily St. John Mandel

Film acting, if you don't play the lead, you come, and you do your scenes in a few days, and you act with a couple of colleagues. All the rest of the actors you never see, and you don't even meet many of them. And you don't know what will happen with what you've done. Maybe it will be in the film, maybe it will not. — Max Von Sydow

My first thought about acting, growing up here in New York, was theater, and I feel like I need to force myself to go get my ass kicked in a rehearsal room and do one of those plays at some point. — Paul Dano

I was like the class clown in school so I guess I would say I did like the attention. In church I did a lot of plays, my mother made me play characters, do a lot of drama and acting, trying to become someone else. So it helped me create who I am, to create Snoop Dogg. — Snoop Dogg

It strikes me that these days, clubs don't even want players who can truly play any more; they just want athletes, quick guys who don't have a football brain, can just run and run; some of them, Jesus. I can never imagine acting like that. — Robbie Fowler

I love when I am not typecast. I've been acting for 50 years. I was such a baby face; I was playing children until I was in my 30s, which frustrated me enormously. Now that I am 65 and getting to play women in their 50s, I am getting paid back for having to play children for so long. — Jacki Weaver

When I'm acting, it's like I am the character - no one can talk to me. But I'm not so method I'd sell my house and live on the street to play a tramp. — Tom Holland

I used to need the character but as I've gotten older I need it less and less - I prefer to play some version of myself. To approach any acting job as me just being me. — Michael Ian Black

If you play it safe every time, then you're missing the best part of acting. You haven't learned anything about your humanity. — Brit Marling

My acting's very understated. I think my sad and happy don't play that differently onscreen. — Bret McKenzie

Playing normal-looking characters really intimidatesme. I got into acting to play anyone but me. — Billy Bob Thornton

My whole career has been fulfilling my childhood fantasies, playing characters that are larger than life, getting to play a knight, an elf, a prince and a soldier. — Orlando Bloom

I love acting, but directing and writing have always been just as important. I started to write so many things when I was even a child. I wrote my first play when I was, like, seven years old. That was me - a writer - for years. — Melanie Laurent

You never get tired of making money, and you never get tired of a great acting gig, a same role that you can play for years, with wonderful writing and wonderful actors. — Peter Jacobson

If the actor gave his performance without knowing that he was in a play, then his tears would be real tears and his life a real life. And whenever I think of this pain and joy that rise up in me, I am carried away by the knowledge that the game I am playing is the most serious and exciting there is. — Albert Camus

I'm trying to find the truth in myself. To play somebody else doesn't interest me. It's not the focus of my life. I can get through most scenes and do the acting part of it, and at best, I'm going to be mediocre. — Neil Diamond

I don't think a man has to go around shouting and play-acting to prove he is something. And a real man don't go around putting other guys down, trampling their feelings in the dirt, making out they're nothing. — Joe Frazier

Involve yourself every day. Work hard and figure out how to love acting all day, every day. It's getting into a made-up situation and making it good and making it real and just playing, just practicing and playing. Like the musicians that I played piano with: they never expect to be rich or famous, but they, for the sheer joy of it, play every day, all day. — Jeff Goldblum

And if all of us are play-acting, there can be no such thing as a soul mate, because we don't have genuine souls. — Gillian Flynn

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

Different scenes call for different acting styles. The kinds of scenes I like most are the ones where you just bury yourself in there. So I wouldn't say that's the only way to be funny, but that's my favorite way to play stuff, to try to put myself in a situation where that kind of acting is necessary. — Will Forte

Paul Schofield said something like, 'If I'm not acting in a play, I don't really exist.' Those weren't the exact words, but he meant it's only when I'm acting in a play that I've got something to say about the world. And then why should I talk, when people can come to see it? — Michael Gambon

I always loved theater and acting in plays and directing, writing little plays and directing friends in plays. — Todd Haynes

It [love about acting] is all about role playing - the same thing you do when you're a kid, when you play with dolls or toys and make up stories. I never grew out of it. — Morgan Freeman

Each religion is a brave guess at the authorship of Hamlet. Yet, as far as the play goes does it make any difference whether Shakespeare or Bacon wrote it? Would it make any difference to the actors if their parts happened out of nothingness, if they found themselves acting on the stage because of some gross and unpardonable accident? Would it make any difference if the playwright gave them the lines or whether they composed them themselves, so long as the lines were properly spoken? Would it make any difference to the characters if A Midsummer Night's Dream was really a dream? — Lewis Mumford

I love acting. I love play-acting. I love pretending. I love telling stories so whether they be comedic or serious or whatever, it doesn't really matter to me. I enjoy telling a good story. I have it all in me. — Jim Carrey

In acting, there's a type of courage you're recognized for all the time. You lose 100 pounds and play a guy with AIDS, and you get rewarded. But, in life, doing what is courageous is quiet, and no one knows about it. Courage is someone making sacrifices for their family or making selfless decisions for what they hope or feel. — Rob Lowe

I would rather give up acting than become world famous, because I think you pay a very high price. Writing and putting new plays out into the world has informed what I do, and I've had a lot more freedom to play really interesting parts. — Lindsay Duncan

When I decided that I might want to do acting for a living - I don't know where it really came from, since there was no school play or any of that - my mom gave me her blessing. I had to get a scholarship - that was the only way I could have gone to drama school. — Gary Oldman

I was always acting. I was doing after-school plays and stuff like that. — Justin Theroux

I wanted to do an acting role in a movie that had nothing to do with the music business or in which I would play a singer or a songwriter. When I act, I don't even want to be thought of as Ne-Yo. — Ne-Yo

So when my film career took off, I always felt like I was trying to play catch-up because I hadn't studied acting before. I didn't know how to manage money or my career. When I look back, I think I was a little bit shell-shocked. — Lea Thompson

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

In writing about Red Guard activists during the Cultural Revolution, Anita Chan has observed that the "playing of a role in China was more than a sociological abstraction. Role-playing involved literal play-acting: a conscious assumption of the mannerisms and ways of speaking appropriate to the activist status and role."187 — Perry Link

The moment I do any puppy dog acting, I think the joke is dead. It's in the truth of how I play it, and the real painful honesty that I approach my performance with. — Jason Gann

The play is the source, it is orchestrated with words. In a movie, you are not dealing with as much as that. There are machines and wires. When you're acting for a camera, it keeps taking and never giving back. — Al Pacino

When I'm in the studio, I write the music, I play the different instruments, I produce it, I arrange it, and it's a self-indulgent exercise. It's the way I make my music. And when I'm acting, I get to leave myself behind, which is a relief. I get to collaborate with a director; I respect the director's medium and all the actors and actresses. So at the end of the day, it's about a character and it's about a director's vision. It's a really good balance for being so intense and alone in my personal process of making music. — Lenny Kravitz

Does a man who is acting on the stage in a female part forget that he is a man? Similarly, we too must play our parts on the stage of life, but we must not identify ourselves with those parts. — Ramana Maharshi

I'm told I was acting in school plays when I was a tiny little boy at the age of three, so they must have seen something then. And even when I was practicing piano eight hours a day, I was still doing school plays. — Christian McKay

Breaking new factual ground is not what Zeitgeist is about, however. Rather, the video is a powerful and fast-acting dose of agitprop, hawking its conclusions as givens. Unfortunately, like most propaganda, it doesn't play fair with its intended audience. At times, while watching it, I felt like I was getting Malcolm McDowell's treatment in Clockwork Orange: eyes pried wide open while getting bombarded with quick-cut atrocity photos. — Jay Kinney

Allan praised Herbert for a job well done and for acting the part well. Herbert blushed, while dismissing the praise, saying it wasn't hard to play stupid when you are stupid. Allan said that he didn't know how hard it was, because the idiots Allan had met so far in his life had all tried to do the opposite. — Jonasson, Jonas

I am impressed and distressed at how passive hierarchical organizations make people. There's often a lot of overt activity, but it's not going anywhere, it's game-playing. It's play-acting at work. — Judith M Bardwick

I would rather do a play because it's instantaneous. You go on the stage, and you know whether it's happening or not. Somebody asked me 'What is acting?' And I said, 'Acting is listening.' And if you ain't listening, nobody's listening. — Charles Durning

I injured myself quite badly when I was seventeen. I broke my ankle, and it didn't heal in such a way that I could keep dancing at the level I wanted to. It wasn't like, 'Oh my god, I'll never play the violin again.' I could, but not at the level I wanted. So, I segued into acting, the other thing that was also meaningful to me. — Kristin Lehman

I have no acting technique I act instinctively. That's why I can't play any role that isn't based on something in my life. — Ethel Waters

I did a play called Throne of Straw when I was 11, at the Odyssey Theatre in Los Angeles. It became really clear to me at that point that I enjoyed acting more than any other experience I was having. — Kiefer Sutherland

I think loads of people see acting, when they're kids, as these magical stories that just happen within the context of the film or the play or the cartoon or whatever they're seeing. They don't imagine that there are actually people that go and do that for a living. — Rebecca Hall

I think all girls secretly want to be actresses because acting seems so glamorous. But as a child, I was always the villager who had one line in the school play. I was shy and I had a bit of a lisp. — Hannah Ware

Film acting is really the trick of doing moments. You rarely do a take that lasts more than 20 seconds. You really earn your spurs acting onstage. I needed to do that for myself. I would hate to say at the end of everything that I never did a stage play. — Sam Shepard

I really feel that the talent I have is acting. Freedom and the possibility of play-that is what I like to have. — Jacqueline Bisset

...as an actor there's nothing better than a great moody moment to play with nothing to say. It's so much easier to do because you can really get inside your head. — Ewan McGregor

Acting, to me, is being given the freedom and ability to play, and that's - that's what I love most about it. I feel very comfortable in playing, whether it be in front of a camera or on stage. — David Wenham

With any part you play, there is a certain amount of yourself in it. There has to be, otherwise it's just not acting. It's lying. — Johnny Depp

I've had a great deal of experience with adolescents over the centuries, and I've discovered that as a group these awkward half children take themselves far too seriously. Moreover, appearance is everything for the adolescent. I suppose it's a form of play-acting. The adolescent knows that the child is lurking under the surface, but he'd sooner die than let it out, and I was no different. I was so intent on being "grown-up" that I simply couldn't relax and enjoy life.
Most people go through this stage and outgrow it. Many, however, do not. The pose becomes more important than reality, and these poor creatures become hollow people, forever striving to fit themselves into an impossible mold. — David Eddings

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

My father's ashes are not yet interred.strangely, I find the fact that he isn't properly laid to rest helps me when I'm doingthis play. — Lynn Redgrave

Actors should be better poker players. But I think there's actual skill and crazy guts that you need to play poker - this ability to put all this money on the line inside of that game of cards. There's this whole different set of skills that doesn't apply to acting whatsoever. — Tom Everett Scott

Acting is like music and you improvise. It's like jazz, there's no rhyme or reason to it. It's not a plan. You practice to music and you just play it. — Denzel Washington

I tend to play every color in the Southern rainbow, and the challenge is to make each character different so I'm not doing any generic 'Southern acting.' — Carrie Preston

I didn't have to do too much "research" or acting to play this guy. (laughs) It is actually very difficult to manage all the time. The Community schedule is crushing and it kills me because I don't get to be with my family as much as I'd like. — Joel McHale

So that's how we go on acting dramas in our theater of the mind even when we don't believe anymore in the audience or the director or the play. — Anne Rice

People who work in offices are crazy, they create an environment they hate, write rules they want to break, cast each other in roles they despise. It's like they're sixth formers in an end of term drama acting out the agony of everything they fear most in their life but they forget to end the play. — Helen Smith

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

It was a wonderful life. To have a stage play right in this room, with real people acting real parts. — Jan Karon

I've stopped showing actors what to actually do. I rather just talk to them about it. Then I usually play music. That's a great way to convey inner emotion, bring the power of style and acting together. That's really what it is, very good acting without talking. — Nicolas Winding Refn