acting

Well I was eight years old, and I have an older cousin who is three years older than me and she was doing acting, commercials, and modeling at the time and... to see my cousin doing that was really inspiring and I wanted to do it. So I went to my mom and I asked her if I could do it, and for the acting part of it, she made me study for a year.

What I loved about the acting class was that you got to think all day long about a person that wasn't you, and figure out why they were sad and what they wanted, what they dreamed.

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

Ideally, I would love to mix singing and acting, but you can only be a pop star for so many years. I mean, at 30 it's a little bit sad, right?

I probably never would have been hired on Broadway had I not moved out to L.A. and pursued acting and film, which is sad, really.

Frankly, I think I'm marvelous in rehearsal! Then you turn the camera on, and it gets stiff and tight. And then you trudge back to your trailer feeling sad. That's been my experience of film acting.

Why do we go around acting as though everything was friendship and reliability when basically everything everywhere is full of sudden hate and ugliness?

I think people involved in politics make good actors. Acting and politics both involve fooling people. People like being fooled by actors. When you get right down to it, they probably like being fooled by politicians even more. A skillful actor will make you think, but a skillful politician will make you never have to think.

For me, acting is about the art of it and it's about being on a film set and doing your thing, painting a blank canvas.

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.

I don't want to discredit people's individuality, but I think people are pretty much the same. People are very similar. If you have a good enough imagination then you can feel things that you personally have never done before. That's acting.

Acting is an imaginative exercise. It would be odd if you didn't try to identify with the roles you play, but I think I can differentiate between where my imagination is leading me and where I actually am.

It's what still excites me most about acting: letting your imagination go places it's never been before. There's nothing better than that.

Everything, I think, about acting is based on imagination.

I think acting is a work of imagination.

If you're trying to learn how to act from a class, you're analyzing the teachers' movements and their intricacies, and it becomes like a pantomime of you wanting to be them, and that's wrong. Literature is an easier way to study acting, because then you can take any kind of spin. It's your own imagination, and your own version of it.

I don't mean to sound - I don't want it to come out funny, but I don't like show business. I love - I love acting in films. I love it.

I mean, sometimes... a comedian becomes an actor, and they just don't deliver, because the bottom line of comedy is to be funny, and the bottom line of acting is to be truthful, and they get that mixed up sometimes, or don't even notice that that's the thing.