"It makes it fun. When an actor plays a character, you want what that character wants. Otherwise it doesn't look authentic. So I really want to defeat Jimmy - I mean Jimmy as the character"
About this Quote
Method acting, without the incense and self-importance. Alan Alda’s line is a neat peek behind the curtain of performance: authenticity isn’t just about hitting marks or sounding “real,” it’s about desire. If the character wants something badly enough, the actor has to want it too - not as an abstract idea, but as a felt, immediate objective. That’s what makes scenes pop. Stakes aren’t declared; they’re generated.
The sly pleasure here is how Alda lets the craft sound like play. “It makes it fun” reframes acting as a game with rules: you commit to an intention, you pursue it, you adjust when blocked. The subtext is almost pragmatic: emotion is often the byproduct of pursuit, not the starting ingredient. Wanting becomes a technical tool. If you don’t want what the character wants, the audience reads the mismatch instantly - the performance turns demonstrative, like someone showing you what anger looks like instead of being angry.
Then comes the little comic stutter: “I really want to defeat Jimmy - I mean Jimmy as the character.” That correction is doing two jobs. It’s a wink at how easily the actor’s competitive drive can spill into real life, and it reassures us he’s not a monster. Acting requires a temporary moral suspension: you borrow someone else’s hungers, including petty ones, because the scene needs them. Alda’s charm is that he admits the weirdness while normalizing it. The “authentic” moment, he suggests, is built from a very human impulse: wanting to win.
The sly pleasure here is how Alda lets the craft sound like play. “It makes it fun” reframes acting as a game with rules: you commit to an intention, you pursue it, you adjust when blocked. The subtext is almost pragmatic: emotion is often the byproduct of pursuit, not the starting ingredient. Wanting becomes a technical tool. If you don’t want what the character wants, the audience reads the mismatch instantly - the performance turns demonstrative, like someone showing you what anger looks like instead of being angry.
Then comes the little comic stutter: “I really want to defeat Jimmy - I mean Jimmy as the character.” That correction is doing two jobs. It’s a wink at how easily the actor’s competitive drive can spill into real life, and it reassures us he’s not a monster. Acting requires a temporary moral suspension: you borrow someone else’s hungers, including petty ones, because the scene needs them. Alda’s charm is that he admits the weirdness while normalizing it. The “authentic” moment, he suggests, is built from a very human impulse: wanting to win.
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| Topic | Movie |
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