Quotes by Tom Wilkinson

Acting for me is not that quid pro quo.
– Tom Wilkinson
All good actors are easy to work with. It's the ones that aren't very good who tend to be very difficult.
– Tom Wilkinson
I have talent. I know it. I've been doing this for 30 years. But at the same time, you not only have to be good; you have to be good in hits.
– Tom Wilkinson
I once did a role which I couldn't rehearse in my street clothes, I had to have the character's costume on before I could rehearse it. I just couldn't think as the character unless I looked like him, or I knew that I looked like him.
– Tom Wilkinson
I wanted something that would be absorbing. I didn't want to fester in front of daytime television and feel bitter like Coriolanus.
– Tom Wilkinson
I won't say I wouldn't be grateful and happy and delighted and thrilled to bits to receive a nomination. But I wouldn't be suicidal if it didn't happen.
– Tom Wilkinson
I would recommend it to everybody, every now and again you just put a dress on, see what it feels like, because it's, its interesting. A whole complex series of thoughts and feelings assail you as you look at yourself.
– Tom Wilkinson
I'm temperamentally suited to the business of acting. I'm quite fatalistic. If it's not happening, it's not happening, and there's very little you can do.
– Tom Wilkinson
If the script is telling the story well, that is your inspiration, and you do not need to go somewhere else.
– Tom Wilkinson
If you have something that you know is important to you and vital to you... then this will perhaps help people understand the importance of confronting it and being brave about it.
– Tom Wilkinson
It is the first time I've ever been in a dress. And it's terrible, well, it's first of all, you kind of, you look at it, and you think, who do I look like? There is a moment of recognition. And it's not quite, and it's, who do I look like? And you think, I got it after, you know, looking at a photograph of me, and I thought, it's my mother. I look like my mother.
– Tom Wilkinson
It's a very simple and rather sort of a primitive feeling when you read a script.
– Tom Wilkinson
It's no good being great in something that goes straight to video.
– Tom Wilkinson
Most stuff you can do standing on your head.
– Tom Wilkinson
Once Miramax gets involved, if they like your movie, there's a big machine that gets involved.
– Tom Wilkinson
One of the characteristics of plays that are made into films is that they can be very talky.
– Tom Wilkinson
The English locution you are familiar with, the body language and all those sorts of things, are denied you, because Americans don't talk in that highly nuanced, middle-class English way.
– Tom Wilkinson
There's only one shot you have at a movie, and that's your best shot. If you can't give it that, don't go. They're paying you! You gotta do a job for them.
– Tom Wilkinson
When I very first started acting, at university, I thought I could do anything. Because you are so ignorant, you don't know what a good production should be. You don't know what the rules are. And then, when you start doing it professionally, you learn the rules and become more intimidated.
– Tom Wilkinson
When you're an actor you don't really know what you have to do until you see what you look like.
– Tom Wilkinson
You can't do things for money. You just can't act them. There's gotta be something about the script that you really want to do. I wouldn't do a job if I didn't think I could do the best work I possibly could.
– Tom Wilkinson
You don't have any kind of sense of being foolish when you are acting. When you're younger you don't want to look a fool, so you don't do things that might make you vulnerable.
– Tom Wilkinson
You know grief. You've had it in your own life. But I don't use it directly. It's processed through my acting instincts, the bit of me that knows about those things, so when it comes out it's not my grief that you're seeing, it's the grief of that character. It's active imagination.
– Tom Wilkinson
You've all seen these documentaries about the soldiers who have gone to war and had some terrible thing happen to them, and they come back horribly mutilated, and they are unrecognizable as the person that went. Now, what happens? Does the wife fail to recognize them? No, of course, they continue to love them and nurture them. I think, in ninety percent of cases, if it's a happy marriage.
– Tom Wilkinson