Elizabeth Debicki Quotes

I don't have a story about an epiphany in which I suddenly realised I wanted to be an actor. It was much more a case of the idea dawning on me gradually.

I guess the bigger you dream, the further you have to fall if you don't get it, so it can be a bit of a scary thing to be that ambitious.

Every time I see a good play or watch a good movie, I have the same feeling I had as a child of wanting to be that person on stage or wanting to run through the forest with a big dress on.

I was very new to working in front of the camera when I started shooting Gatsby, so I set myself the mission of gleaning as much information as possible out of the much more experienced actors. The cast was astoundingly talented.

The comforting thing for Australian actors is that there's a strong community in L.A. as well - it's almost like you swap one home for another. I didn't feel any pressure.

There's a lot to be said for being in a room with a casting agent or a director. There are things you can't really replicate when you're self-taping and there's the bonus of having someone to direct you, which is extremely helpful. The benefit of self-taping is, I suppose, being on your own clock. It's certainly more relaxing to self-tape than to audition with someone in the flesh but I don't know if it's necessarily better.

I definitely try my best not to stay in character when I'm not on set, which can be more difficult in some roles than others.

I don't really look at the skillset of being an actor as different in each medium. It asks a different thing of you as an actor, but for me, I draw upon the same skillset. It's just a different tuning of your tools as to who you're doing it for, whether you're doing it for an intimate camera or an audience of 2,000 people.

I think my parents wanted me to do something very normal, have a normal person job and not be confronted by the instability of an artistic pursuit, but there wasn't really a lot they could do to stop me. I was, at one point, going to go to law school when I finished high school, but the next day I got accepted into acting school and there was no real question in my mind of what I was going to do.

I grew up learning ballet and then I took up contemporary as I got older. I probably thought I was going to be a ballet dancer when I was younger, but at a certain age, I really was more interested in acting.

Kissing in films, it's just another thing you have to do. It kind of becomes as technical as how to open a door, really.

Our industry is so technologically driven that often I Skype with directors or send tapes in to people. It's so common now that sometimes even when I'm here I'll be send tapes for things that are based in the U.K. There's never really a right place, right time anymore. Even something that's L.A. based, the director might be in New York or they might be on location in Budapest. I think everyone's really accepting of the fact that people are all over the world all the time. In a funny way, you can be an actor now and live anywhere, so long as you have internet.