"Sometimes when you play a character, you can feel it in your body. And I felt like I had characteristics of my dog: the way Webster moves, the way he holds his head. I kind of adapted it into this part unconsciously"
About this Quote
Acting, at its best, is less about pretending and more about borrowing - from memory, from habit, from whatever living thing has left an imprint on your nervous system. Calista Flockhart’s confession that she “felt like I had characteristics of my dog” lands because it’s so unglamorous and so true: performance isn’t always engineered in the mind. Sometimes it arrives through the body like a reflex.
The intent here is disarming honesty. She’s puncturing the myth of the actor as a purely intellectual architect of character, replacing it with something messier: embodiment. The dog detail matters because it’s intimate and specific; it implies long observation, daily proximity, a kind of love practiced through routine. That’s why the line “unconsciously” carries weight. It signals that the best choices aren’t always “choices” at all, but absorbed behaviors - posture, tempo, attention - that surface when the camera demands specificity.
The subtext is a defense of instinct in a profession that often fetishizes “method” as suffering or grand psychological excavation. Flockhart is describing a softer, craftier method: mimicry without ego. Dogs are also creatures of clear intention and readable emotion; to borrow their physicality is to borrow directness. In an era where audiences can smell acting-from-the-neck-up, her point is quietly contemporary: the body keeps the score, and sometimes it keeps the character too.
The intent here is disarming honesty. She’s puncturing the myth of the actor as a purely intellectual architect of character, replacing it with something messier: embodiment. The dog detail matters because it’s intimate and specific; it implies long observation, daily proximity, a kind of love practiced through routine. That’s why the line “unconsciously” carries weight. It signals that the best choices aren’t always “choices” at all, but absorbed behaviors - posture, tempo, attention - that surface when the camera demands specificity.
The subtext is a defense of instinct in a profession that often fetishizes “method” as suffering or grand psychological excavation. Flockhart is describing a softer, craftier method: mimicry without ego. Dogs are also creatures of clear intention and readable emotion; to borrow their physicality is to borrow directness. In an era where audiences can smell acting-from-the-neck-up, her point is quietly contemporary: the body keeps the score, and sometimes it keeps the character too.
Quote Details
| Topic | Dog |
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