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Quotes by Robert Carlyle

A lot of the characters I play come from the working-class. It's a background I'm familiar with. It's not about being hard. It's just knowing how that society works and what the rules are.I grew up in a working-class area of Glasgow and that experience has stood me in good stead.
– Robert Carlyle
Acting is probably the greatest therapy in the world. You can get a lot stuff out of you on the set so you don't have to take it home with you at night. It's the stuff between the lines, the empty space between those lines which is interesting.
– Robert Carlyle
Biologically, I'm lucky - an angular face and dark colouring which shows up well on camera.
– Robert Carlyle
Every actor I think has got their own number of takes that they like, you know. Some actors like to go all day, you know on the one scene and some actors want to take two takes. I personally like four.
– Robert Carlyle
I feel with TV you're allowed more freedom. With television there's more time to create something through the episodes. The fact that you're working harder on the surface seems more difficult, but you get into a way of working where if you're not allowed to stop and breathe and think about it, you just go on instinctively, which is the way I prefer anyway. It becomes a more spontaneous thing.
– Robert Carlyle
I must have been dreaming about Albie. I spoke in a Liverpool accent all the time. It becomes second nature. It's much easier like that. It seems to me common sense rather than extraordinary.
– Robert Carlyle
I must have done something right because they gave me a grant to the Royal Scottish Academy Of Music And Drama in 1983. But I hated all that stuff they taught me while thumping out the rawness and energy I had. I went off and formed a small experimental, often political, theatre company called Rain Dog to unlearn it.
– Robert Carlyle
I want to keep audiences off balance, so they don't know who I am or how to take me. If I duck and weave, as Frank Bruno might say, I'll have a longer shelf life.
– Robert Carlyle
I'll spare you the actors' pretentious rubbish, but a face reflects experience, so if you concentrate on a character something happens to you physically. Many actors look at the costume before the part, and that seems crazy to me. It's much more fun to be ugly. Not that I think I'm ugly, but I've never considered myself good-looking.
– Robert Carlyle
I'm in four different films this year, and I have four different accents. I sound different in every film. You have to love a character to play it well, and change in my work is what I want.
– Robert Carlyle
It depends who the director is you know, I mean Ken Loach for instance. I've done up to 32 takes with him.
– Robert Carlyle
Looking after Jo Jo was far more psychologically draining than The Full Monty. There's more to TFM than meets the eye, obviously, but something like JoJo is in a different darker mould. That's something I enjoy.
– Robert Carlyle
The darker the character, the more interesting.
– Robert Carlyle
The script will point you in certain directions and I go the opposite if I can. I try do do one thing and tell a different story with my eyes. I believe what's more interesting is always what's not being said.
– Robert Carlyle
The way a person moves tells you a lot about them. Look at the way I'm holding this coffee mug. If I were to thump it down on the table, I wouldn't be respecting your tape recorder. If I move it gently, it means I am showing some respect. These are the things I bring to my performances.
– Robert Carlyle
To be honest I've worked with a few American actors now and I was looking forward to that you know, coming up in my career thinking Yeah I'd like to work with some Americans because they seem to be very, very comfortable with improvisation. But that has not been my experience at all. They have to have things absolutely set.
– Robert Carlyle
We met in Cracker. I played a maniac fan who murders a policeman and she did my makeup. I thought anyone interested in me looking like that must have genuinely liked me.
– Robert Carlyle
When you work with Ken Loach, more than 60 per cent of it is NAR - No Acting Required - whereas with other scripts maybe only 10 per cent is NAR, and the rest is performance. It's switching off the performance head that attracts me, because it allows me to escape deeper into the real person. There's no gestures, nothing; it's not about actor's pauses, but human pauses.
– Robert Carlyle
There are a lot of things that make up a performance, a lot of technical things. It isn't always just about pulling it up from the darkest recesses of your mind or your heart. It's your experience and your observation.
– Robert Carlyle
People go to the movies to watch a film and all they're thinking about is the actress's cellulite they saw in a magazine.
– Robert Carlyle
My first love is art, and I see a lot of things in an artistic way.
– Robert Carlyle
My dad was rubbish at all other aspects of his financial life, but he's pretty good at paying the rent.
– Robert Carlyle
In troubled times the last thing you want to do is to stick your money into a film. It's such a gamble.
– Robert Carlyle
In the late '70s, maybe just before I started, there was still an attitude that if you did film you didn't do TV and vice versa, but that's gone now.
– Robert Carlyle
I've always taken my love of children from my father. He was a children magnet. Suddenly, having my first child hit home what my dad went through.
– Robert Carlyle
I love sci-fi because it leads in the imagination, and I always say it has the most intelligent fans in the world.
– Robert Carlyle
I don't take a great deal of interest in party politics. Social politics interests me a great deal more.
– Robert Carlyle
Acting, the arts in general, is a magnet for the wounded of society.
– Robert Carlyle