Quotes & Sayings About Screen Acting

I never really saw my dad as entertained as when he was just completely blown away by somebody on the television screen or at the movies. I think that's the real reason that I went into acting. — Kim Basinger

There is a difference between movie actors and TV acting, especially with movie stars, which is they know their face is 20 feet high on the screen. They know they don't have to do much. — Noah Hawley

In terms of my relationships with a lot of the adult characters, when I was working with Harrison, it wasn't like a verbal agreement, but we both understood that because there was this constant tension between our characters, we couldn't say "Cut" and start acting normal. We had to keep an essence of that relationship in our characters off screen which is really important. — Asa Butterfield

When it comes to acting on green screen, it doesn't really make all that much of a difference to me because how you interact with your environment or characters is always dictated by your imagination. So when you're acting against a green screen, you have more of an opportunity to create your own world. So what was magical throughout this process was watching this movie come to life with the 3D. — Anita Briem

I am thrilled that DDLJ has beaten all records, Shah Rukh Khan and I share a close friendship that translates onto the screen. We have such fun working together. Shah Rukh has a great sense of humour. He invests incredible energy into his acting. He reads a lot. I share all these with him. I love books. I love his style of working and abundant refinement. I love him to death and would like to work with him again. — Kajol

TV stars are cool. Even if their characters are less than admirable, they come across as somehow sympathetic, maybe even neighborly. They are, after all, people you invite into your home every week. If you don't like them, you won't watch them.

Movie stars, by contrast, are hot. They have to blaze so fiercely that they fill a screen forty feet high and demand the attention of a crowded theater.

That's why very few TV stars have graduated successfully to features. It requires not only different skills but a different personality. You have to go from amiable to commanding.

Likewise, some movie stars are simply too big for television. Jack Nicholson is riveting on-screen, but you wouldn't want him in your living room week after week. The television simply couldn't contain his personality. — Walter Jon Williams

I want to do it all. I want to climb mountains, go through jungles, fight wars in space, get the girl, shoot the bad-guy full of lead, have all the zippy one liners, bulge muscles out of a singlet, drip sweat and blood on screen, all of that. — Benedict Cumberbatch

There's a myth about actors saying, 'Oh no, that's not me on screen at all. I'm just acting.' OK, if I were to say to you that's not me, that's fine. And I would tell you that I don't behave like a villain everyday, and that's true, I don't. But to say there's absolutely none of me in there is ridiculous. — Cary Elwes

Acting is fantastic, but to be able to create a whole world on celluloid is amazing. It's like taking your dreams straight from your head and projecting them onto a screen. — Amber Benson

You can be as beautiful and charming as you'd like, but if you're not terrific at acting, it will mean nothing on the screen. — Steven Moffat

I can't watch most of my work. Once I come on screen, all I can think of is 'What am I doing with my hands?' or 'Why did I lean that way?' or 'What's that look on my face?' It's too difficult to not focus on evaluating my acting. — Katie McGrath

I spent a long time working in the movies to figure out that kind of acting and also how to write and produce for the screen. — Denis Leary

People find it hard to get their heads around nominating a computer-generated character, but every time you see Gollum on the screen, that's me who is acting up there - even if it is behind a mass of pixels - and it's my voice you hear. — Andy Serkis

(The) process of acting is no different to conventional screen acting, in that it's providing a perfect interface between the director and the performer. So there's no sort of long way around a viral committee of animators. — Andy Serkis

I'm getting so old - it's more uncomfortable to do those scenes now than when I was 20. I mean, I don't have a big problem with nudity on screen. But usually the days when you do those naked love scenes are the weirdest ones on set. Everyone is uncomfortable. You're like, 'Hi. How are you?' Then the next minute you're with an actress who you don't know and you're pretending to make love to her in front of all the crew. The acting challenge is pretending things are OK. — Javier Bardem

With some actors, you can tell when they're acting all by themselves, no matter who else is in the screen. — John Travolta

Kissing on screen is just, funny enough you're just acting so you're distracted by that more than anything. Or at least I am. I'm actually always coming away from those things going like, 'I wonder how I kissed just now.' Because I have no idea! I'm just thinking about what's happening. — Dylan O'Brien

In professional wrestling, I think that they want you to be bigger than life. It's almost like an over-acting type thing - whereas on the big screen, you're 35 feet and they've got a close-up of you to put it on the screen in the movie house. At 35 feet, it's more subtlety than the overboard drama that we do in pro wrestling. — Kevin Nash

I do research. I do emotional sort of Method work. Somehow it's a huge mishmash of things that becomes my own acting process and my own way of navigating through something. But ultimately the desire is to be honest, and for that truth to bleed through into your work and onto the screen. — Nicole Kidman

You can throw away the privilege of acting, but that would be such a shame. The tribe has elected you to tell its story. You are the shaman/healer, that's what the storyteller is, and I think it's important for actors to appreciate that. Too often actors think it's all about them, when in reality it's all about the audience being able to recognize themselves in you. The more you pull away from the public, the less power you have on screen. — Ben Kingsley

Unfortunately, or perhaps it is fortunate that I have always been forced to stand on my acting ability. I haven't a personality such as Jack Gilbert's, for instance, that attracts women and makes them like me for myself. When I am on the screen I must make them forget me entirely and think only of my acting. — William Powell

I don't believe in acting. I think that people in life act, but when you are on the stage or, in my case, also on screen, you have to be true. — Luise Rainer

Keanu Reeves?" she asks in amazement. I nod. "What did he wish for?" "Isn't it obvious?" I say, waving a hand at the screen. "Fame." "That's why he's famous? Because of a wish?" "Have you seen his movies? Surely you didn't think he made it on his acting skills?" I grant wishes; I don't work miracles. Viola looks back at the screen, eyes screwed up in awe. "I guess that makes sense," she says faintly as my former master delivers a line poorly. "Wow. — Jackson Pearce

I go to universities to talk to the students and teach them how to watch movies. Movies have so many elements - acting, music, art direction, costumes. I also tell them not to watch pirated movies. At the cinema, they can enjoy the big screen and the surround sound. — Andrew Lau

The great difference between screen acting and theatre acting is that screen acting is about reacting - 75% of the time, great screen actors are great reactors. — Nicolas Roeg

Honestly, I don't aspire to be a huge movie star. I really just fell in love with acting ... Everything I do on-screen is very subtle. — Dave Bautista

What attracted me to acting, from the start, was playing different characters. I'm not a massive fan of just playing myself on screen. — Freddie Stroma

Well, acting is cheap; I knew all these actors who weren't in the Screen Actors Guild yet, and it happened that they were all just about thirty years old. — John Sayles

I've found acting on stage much more challenging than on screen. — Elizabeth McGovern

On 'Into The Wild' I spent months risking my life and on 'Speed Racer' I spent 60 days acting in front of a green screen. No danger to my physical self, but I sure had to use my imagination. — Emile Hirsch

I don't approach my acting as just saying a few lines and then going off-screen. It's a craft. I really invest in trying to make it a craft. — Aneurin Barnard

Regarding green screen, green screen is really like doing some stage work. You have to make believe that there is a window, make believe that something is there that is really not there and convince the audience. It's part of acting. — Benicio Del Toro

I want to inspire people with my work, whether I'll be dancing, acting, on the big screen, or in the production room. — Vivian Nixon

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

On some level, acting is the art of pretend, and you have to have a highly cultivated sense of imagination. You have to be able to see things that aren't there, no matter what aspect of acting, whether it's green screen, whether it's on stage, whether it's anything else, whether you're working on the radio. — Stephen Lang

When most dullards hear the words 'the theater,' they envision a twelve-screen multiplex where disaster porn entertains the culturally witless for 90 minutes at a time. Pfaugh. The word 'theater' has grandeur. Power. Back to its ancient Grecian origins, it means 'the seeing place.' A stage upon which actors and actresses use fiction to show us truths. — Mark Waid

I always loved how people like Jon Voight and Laurence Olivier shocked you every time they came on-screen. They were so different each time. That's what I hope to do with acting - be the chameleon and not get stuck in a type. — Julia Stiles

Any acting is a stretch of the imagination. That's your job. Acting is truth in imaginary circumstances. Acting with green screen or a motion capture stage, you're striving for absolute truth in absolutely imaginary circumstances. — Sam Worthington

There is this miraculous thing I heard Hugh Grant talking about - the thing about screen acting is that you can read people's thoughts. You are trying to register something inside and usually the eyes in cinema are where you will register that. — Toby Jones

I had never done anything with blue screen before, or prosthetics, or anything like that. Lord of the Rings was like stepping into a videogame for me. It was another world completely. But, to be honest, I basically did it so that I could have the ears. I thought they would really work with my bare head.Working with Martin Scorsese was an absolute minute-by-minute education without him ever being grandiose about it. — Cate Blanchett

I wish they taught green screen acting classes. — Hayden Christensen

My first film, 'Like Minds,' was with Toni Colette, who was extraordinary. I mean it was basically a mini-masterclass for acting on film at a time when all you could probably see were my eyebrows bouncing up and down on screen. — Eddie Redmayne

There was more good acting at Hollywood parties than ever appeared on the screen. — Bette Davis

Acting for screen is very different from acting on stage, and then obviously when you dance ... everything is a physical embodiment. But the discipline is the same approach. You have to take both things seriously; nothing well-crafted is by mistake. — Amanda Schull

I can get caught in many things but there is one thing I will never get caught in, and that is acting - because I don't act. On screen I am like I am in real life. — Salman Khan

I'm not experienced enough, or certain enough of my acting on the screen to say to a director, "You are wrong, I am right. I will only do it this way." I could never feel that, I wish I could be absolutely certain. But on the stage, it's different. I know where I am on the stage. — Ian McKellen

How do you explain certain physical qualities that somehow sell on screen? You're born with it ... Certain people are just more watchable, and I was more watchable, but I don't think I understood acting or drama very well when I was a kid. — Joan Chen

You once liked the blissful mobility, but then you wonder, who's the real you? And who's the chap on the screen? You know, I catch myself acting out my life like a goddamn script. — Errol Flynn

Acting in theatre or television or screen is only for the irrecoverably diseased, those so smitten with the need that there is no choice. — Michael Shurtleff

(Acting) is an extension of life. How you're capable of performing in your life, that's how you're capable of performing on screen. — John Cassavetes

My professional acting life, stage and screen, has brought me public support, emotional fulfillment and material comfort. It has brought me together with fine people, good companions with whom I've shared the inevitable lot of all actors: flops and hits. — Peter O'Toole

Acting must be scaled down for the screen. A drawing room is a lot smaller than a theatre auditorium. — Arthur Lowe

As a dancer, it's hard because there's such a perfectionist quality that you really have to let go of while you're acting, because nobody wants to a watch a perfect person on screen. — Kathryn McCormick

I couldn't believe it! I mean, I'd always dreamed of acting on the screen - my previous background was all theater - but I wasn't sure if the opportunity would ever present itself. Not only was this acting for the screen, this was acting in 'The Hunger Games!' I knew that I had to give this audition my all. — Jacqueline Emerson

I really dislike watching myself on screen. I am very insecure about my acting. We are our own biggest critics. I have to sit in another room to my parents when they watch it. — Sophie Turner

Acting on a blue screen is awful. — Steve Burns