Words matter. These are the best Cress Williams Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
When you’re playing a superhero, you’re almost playing two different people. I separate when I’m playing Jefferson Pierce and the days when I’m playing Black Lightning.
I grew up watching television. I’m a television addict. I had all these heroes, but they didn’t look like me.
From the moment I turned 39, 40, I really turned a corner and became a person who really enjoys working out. When I don’t get a chance to, I miss it. I also just recognized that it would give me career longevity if I kept myself in the best shape I could possibly be in.
As an actor, the only pressure I have is to just be truthful and to do my best work.
There are aspects of small town life that I really like – the routine nature of it, the idea of people knowing you and your likes and dislikes.
What’s great about acting is that there’s never a moment when you’re like, ‘OK, I got this, I understand this.’ You’re portraying life, and it’s a craft that only gets better with time – kind of like playing a musical instrument: the more you get to play it, the better you are.
Shooting a season can be a grind. It can be seven to eight months of work. Once you stop, it slows down any momentum you had.
A lot of times, people believe that until you’re a certain-list actor, you say yes to everything; you’re not allowed to say no. But early on, something went off in me, and if something didn’t ring true for a myriad of reasons, I would say no and was fortunate enough to have people around me that were OK with that.
A friend of mine kind of revealed to me that idea that there has been countless Supermen and Batman. But I’m the first person to play Black Lightning. It’s exciting to originate a character.
Generally speaking, I would say villains are a little more exciting to play, but if you get a flawed hero, then that can almost be just as amazing.
I’m a big fan of superheroes and fantasy and sci-fi. I have been since I was a child.
Who I always refer to as my acting mentor when I got into junior college is an acting professor by the name of Tom Blank. He took me under his wing, and he was that strong male figure. He was tough love, but he believed in me, saw everything that I had.
I was a poor kid. I grew up watching film and television but primarily television. And I graduated high school, and I knew I wanted to go to college because nobody in my family had. So I was like, ‘I’ll go and be a theater major.’
When I get into collecting things, I get a little obsessive. Which is why when I start buying comics, I buy way too many, and I have to stop myself.
Back in the day as a kid, I was really drawn to the Hulk because it just felt so human and was probably one of the first stories that I felt emotionally invested in and not just thought it was really cool. You really feel for that person and put yourself in that situation.
As an actor, so much of life is out of your control, and it’s really not solid.
As a kid, you just like anything fanciful that you’re into, but as an adult, I really love that kind of place where the super hero mythos meets life, where it has that human story; that’s what I think I was really drawn to when I started getting into the X-Men.
Unfortunately, when you look at the amount of comic book heroes out there, minority heroes are few and far between.
I hadn’t gotten a chance to do a lot of comedy, so ‘Hart of Dixie’ was a great place where I got a chance to do that and play.
As an actor, the flaws are the things that are juicy to play. If the character is perfect, it can be a little boring.
