Act before you think – your instincts are more honest than your thoughts.
Acting is behaving truthfully under imaginary circumstances.
If you want to reach every person in the audience, it’s not about being bigger, it’s about going deeper.
Don’t be an actor. Be a human being who works off what exists under imaginary circumstances.
Your acting will not be good until it is only yours. That’s true of music, acting, anything creative. You work until finally nobody is acting like you.
The only way to deal with yourself as an actor is to follow the emotional truth of what you have to do under the imaginary circumstances. And as you develop you become confident. You come to believe in what you’re doing and trust it because it’s out of you.
Silence has a myriad of meanings. In the theater, silence is an absence of words, but never an absence of meaning.
That which hinders your task is your task.
You can’t learn to act unless you’re criticized. If you tie that criticism to your childhood insecurities you’ll have a terrible time. Instead, you must take criticism objectively, pertaining it only to the work being done.
If you have the emotion, it infects you and the audience. If you don’t have it don’t bother; just say your lines as truthfully as you are capable of doing. You can’t fake emotion.
The truth of ourselves is the root of our acting.