Robert Carlyle Quotes (17 Quotes)



    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.

    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.

    Dance is powerful. I need to shoulder the challenge.

    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.


    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.

    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.

    It depends who the director is you know, I mean Ken Loach for instance. I've done up to 32 takes with him.

    Biologically, I'm lucky - an angular face and dark colouring which shows up well on camera.

    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.

    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.

    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.

    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.

    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.


    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.

    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.


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