Words matter. These are the best Ato Essandoh Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
You don’t want to be a gimmick. You don’t want to be a set piece, where people go, ‘Hey, that’s weird.’
Our next black president, I think, can be more like Muhammad Ali.
You look at how Barack Obama has had to conduct himself as president. It reminds me of Jackie Robinson, how he had to be very careful to reassure people that this was all right.
The Chinese Student Association at Cornell put together their own play. It was all Asian people in the cast except for me, because they wanted to do a couple of scenes about an interracial relationship. I was the only non-Asian person on stage; the entire audience was Asian apart from my 10 friends that showed up.
Growing up near Scarsdale, I should have had at least one Jewish girlfriend. Maybe at some point it’ll happen.
If you’re going to sign a contract, there are things you have to understand you might have to do. If you don’t, then you walk away.
There’s some dues that you just have to pay in life.
I’ve never dated a Jewish woman.
When you’re a guest star on a movie or a TV show, I always say it’s like being invited to a family reunion, but it’s not your family. So you don’t belong – they’re being nice to you, but you don’t fit in completely; you don’t know everybody’s story. You don’t have a history.
I was in chemical engineering at Cornell University. My girlfriend at the time dared me to do a play. I knew there was something I wanted, not necessarily engineering.
A really good impressionist, even if they don’t look at all like the person they’re impersonating, it’s a weird thing where they start to look like that person. It’s kind of odd.
Just the little bit that I’ve learned about Judaism, I didn’t realize how, dare I say, intense that religion is as far as all of the things that you have to know and remember and the ritualism of it.
You look at how Barack Obama has had to conduct himself as President. It reminds me of Jackie Robinson, how he had to be very careful to reassure people that this was all right. And you still have people trying to tear him down. They make up all sorts of lies, with the goal of making him seem illegitimate.
Quentin Tarantino and Sam Jackson are the reasons I’m an actor.
When I tell my friends, ‘I’m in the ‘Bourne’ movie,’ they’re like, ‘Congratulations! Wait… is Matt Damon coming back?’ I go, ‘Yeah.’ And they’re like, ‘Yo! Matt Damon! Matty D!’ Everyone pretends they know Matt Damon. It’s exciting.
I grew up listening to blues and rock n’ roll and other music, but, legitimately, the Stones is one of my favorite bands in the world.
Traveling, I’ve met Ghanaian people who have seen me in minor stuff, but they see the name Ato Essandoh, and they recognize it as a Ghanaian name. They come up to me and are always so excited. You don’t think about it, but they really absorb American culture.
Another benefit of going to Cornell is that 90 percent of your friends are doctors.
Macklemore gets a Grammy over Kendrick Lamar. I still can’t get over that. But again, it’s not Macklemore’s fault. It’s the way of the country.
I have a theater company that I’m a part of, Colt Coeur, and they do some really rad projects.
I know I’m supposed to say this, but I really, genuinely think Matt Damon is a great dude.
‘Copper’ is my first period piece. It’s funny because I’ve been doing a lot of episodes of ‘Elementary’ with Johnny Lee Miller and Lucy Liu; they keep bringing me back on the show, and so I go from being an outstanding black doctor to being a kind of hood, ex-car thief who went through rehab in ‘Elementary.’
What’s nice about having an engineering degree is everybody thinks you are smart.
Once you get my snark going, I’ll just start snarking it up all over Twitter.
If you get too deep into the history, what often happens to a lot of us actors is that we become stilted. We forget that we’re reading about something that happened a hundred years ago. If we don’t put the human emotion that would naturally be in there, we end up being stilted instead of being human beings.
When ‘Goodfellas’ is on TNT, and they’ve taken out all the curse words and put Tide commercials in the middle of it, I’ll still watch ‘Goodfellas’ because it’s that great of a movie.
Everything musically, for me, there’s two kinds of music. There’s Prince and Jimi Hendrix and then Miles Davis and everything filters through that.
I’d never thought about acting as a job. I was an engineer; I was in science and technology. I loved movies and television growing up, but I’d never thought about it as, ‘Oh, that guy Denzel Washington is employed as an actor.’
The first time I ever heard the blues, my parents had a stack of records that they weren’t using anymore. I found them when I was ten; I didn’t know what it was. But I found Lightnin’ Hopkins.
All of my friends on the street we’re Jewish. I went to a lot of bar and bat mitzvahs. I even learned a little Hebrew.
