Any actor who judges his character is a fool - for every role you play you've got to absorb that character's motives and justifications.
Interpretation
Actors should fully embody their characters without judgment to deliver authentic performances.
In this quote, Alan Rickman emphasizes the importance of understanding and fully inhabiting the characters an actor portrays. Judging a character limits the depth of performance, as true acting requires empathy and immersion into the character's motives and justifications, allowing for a more genuine portrayal that resonates with the audience.
In practice
In a workshop for aspiring actors, this quote can be shared to encourage them to fully embrace their roles.
Film has to be reflecting the world that we live in, and that's all you want to be a part of. Actors inhabit the same planet as everyone else. It's a weird thing that happens when you're an actor because people hold you up because you somehow embody in parts groups of people or people's hopes or something.
You can act truthfully or you can lie. You can reveal things about yourself or you can hide. Therefore, the audience recognizes something about themselves or they don't -- You hope they don't leave the theatre thinking that was nice...now where's the cab?'
I'm a lot less serious than people think, it's probably because the way my face is put together.
Those of you who are not aware of my brilliant career as a stand up comic, I'm not aware of it either so we might well wonder what we're doing here.
Acting is mostly about listening. If you just focus in on what the other person is saying, acting takes care of itself to quite a large extent.
When I am asked about influences, I always say I bow down to Fred Astaire, because when you look at him dancing you never look at his extremities, do you? You look at his centre. What you never see is the hours of work that went into the routines, you just see the breathtaking spirit and freedom.
Playwriting is the last great bastion of the individual writer. It's exciting precisely because it's where the money isn't. Money goes to safety, to consensus. It's not individualism.
All the definitions people want to put on you in terms of what kind of writer you are come with hidden meanings. If you're writing science fiction, you're writing rocket ships. If you write dystopian fiction, it's inequity where The Man must be fought.
I've been imitated so well I've heard people copy my mistakes.
A created thing is never invented and it is never true: it is always and ever itself.
When I was seven or eight years old, I began to read the science-fiction magazines that were brought by guests into my grandparents' boarding house in Waukegan, Illinois. Those were the years when Hugo Gernsback was publishing 'Amazing Stories,' with vivid, appallingly imaginative cover paintings that fed my hungry imagination.
Writing is almost a place of dreams for me, and I don't have to give up anything to do it.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.