Daily Inspiration Quote by Tom Baker

There is a sly confession tucked inside Tom Baker's line: the actor's magic trick isn't fooling the audience, it's self-hypnosis. "Trick themselves" reframes performance as an internal con, a deliberately induced credulity that lets cardboard sets and borrowed dialogue register as real stakes. That private act of belief is what makes the public act convincing. Without it, acting becomes mere recitation; with it, even the thinnest premise can feel electrically alive.

Baker's choice of "anything" is the tell. He's not praising taste or discernment; he's describing a professional superpower that can attach itself to the sublime or the ridiculous with equal intensity. That's funny, but it's also slightly alarming. If your job is to summon authentic emotion on demand, you develop a practiced willingness to override common sense. "As if it's fantastic" points to the engine of the whole enterprise: not truth, but the conditional truth of pretend. The phrase captures the actor's essential bargain with reality - suspend disbelief, not just for two hours, but as a daily craft.

"It's a kind of madness really" lands like a wink and a warning. Baker, whose career includes playing an iconic time-traveling alien, knows how thin the line is between imaginative freedom and psychological strain. The subtext is respect for the craft, laced with skepticism about its costs: the same mental flexibility that creates wonder can also blur boundaries, turning vulnerability into a tool you use at work. The remark protects him from romanticizing acting while still admitting its strange, necessary intensity.