Acting allows me to tell a lot of stories, you know start at the beginning, finish at the end, and tell everything in between. Modelling is just an image.
I got involved with an acting school and studied for a couple years. They used to have improv exercises that you would work on and you would do improvs.
I earn a lot of money in England doing voice-overs, especially in documentaries. Turn on the Discovery Channel here, and you'll hear my voice a lot. It subsidizes my vice of acting in the theater.
In LA, too many people want to go the quickest route from A to B. Method acting offers them that.
With any role, you're extending yourself and acting out things that never happened to you.
I was picked up on a London street by a model agent. She took me to her office and then sent me to Paris to work in shows. It was supposed to be two weeks, but I ended up living there with my Zimbabwean boyfriend. I made enough money modeling and acting in French movies to buy a nice flat.
The thing I love about music is that if a singer is good, let's say, you are instantly transported to that emotion. Acting is a more drawn-out process.
I know that if I'd had to go and take an exam for acting, I wouldn't have got anywhere. You don't take exams for acting, you take your courage.
Acting, at least for me, is very unreal, and when I'm doing it, I actually feel embarrassed.
What's beautiful about the actual acting class environment is that you can use it to push through everything: push your voice, push your inhibitions, push your fears, push your confidence, push your vulnerability, push your silences.
At this point, I feel fairly comfortable in terms of performance. I think having a sketch background actually helps a lot. Because my background is acting, and stand-up, in a lot of ways, is acting.
I'm very lucky that I get to make a living out of acting, which is what I love, and the level of attention I receive has sometimes been my own fault and sometimes not been.
When in doubt, make a fool of yourself. There is a microscopically thin line between being brilliantly creative and acting like the most gigantic idiot on earth. So what the hell, leap.
I was always drawn to performing. I took improv and acting classes during the summers and was involved in middle and high school plays. But when I discovered indie and punk music in high school, those things sort of took over.
I got into acting as a young child on account of a sort of arbitrary thing. A friend of my mom's was a casting director, so really, as kind of a lark, I had a couple of acting jobs that had just enough exposure to give me the option to continue if I wanted to. I followed through with it.
One good thing about acting in film is that it's good therapy.
It's fine to seek professional help, but I urge everyone - no matter how big their portfolio - to truly understand every suggestion they're given before acting.
I'm so different from the egotistical, self-centred person I was when I did those things. And to watch someone acting out your memories on the screen is like reliving it. Like someone taking you back and showing you what you did.
I want to explore a lot of things, do acting here and there.
I think when you're working with a character that another writer is acting as - for lack of a better word - custodian of, your obligation as a professional is to not do anything that violates that 'primary' take.
When people see me in something and say, 'That's just you - that's not acting,' it's the best compliment I can get.
I came out to California to live with my mom in Orange County for a while, and then I came up to Hollywood. I had just turned nineteen. I took an acting class at Playhouse West and decided, 'Wow, I think I can do this!' I studied really hard for three years before I got an agent.
I like to use all of myself, and acting wasn't doing that.
I think the unemployment rate for actors is pretty much the same in Sydney, London and New York. In all three cities, there are more actors than there are jobs. But I do think that there are far more acting opportunities in London and New York than in Sydney, where there are approximately seven actors that you see over and over again in every play.
I just think there's always room for humanity in acting, one can only hope, so when you bring in the whole life of a person that's playing a character, then surprises happen and are allowed to happen, and so it makes it more interesting.
Acting was never planned.
Acting is different from stand-up. It gives you this ability to enter into another character, to create another person.
It always makes me sad when I think of how I saw Wagner wasting his vitality, not only by singing their parts to some of his artists, but acting out the smallest details, and of how few they were who were responsive to his wishes.
The action-movie genre is a very difficult one to get satiated in terms of your acting bits.
I love acting. When I'm acting I feel like I'm on vacation. I'm just having a wonderful time. The nightmare is just getting the work to happen.
My acting ability would have sent me back to the post office. It was my singing that got me jobs. Ironically, now, people think of me as an actor and don't know me much as a singer.
I actually got hurt in a steel factory in 1985 and so that changed my life. I went to a junior college and that's where I discovered acting.
I always tell young actors to have a back-up. You don't want to find yourself at the age of 30 still struggling to make a living out of acting.
For me, I've never drawn a distinction between live-action acting and performance-capture acting. It is purely a technology.
I believe acting to be my own journey through connection more than anything else, but that's only my take on it.
I'm not trying to take anything away from film acting, because it's also really hard, and I worship the people who are great at it. But to actually have to go out on stage night after night and do it with your audience right there is so wild and scary and exciting and fun and all the things that I remember loving about it.
