Top 30 Jordan Gavaris Quotes

One time, I was literally stopped on the street, literally and physically whipped around by this guy who looked at my face and was like, ‘Are you Felix?’ I looked very different then. I was like, ‘Yah… Oh, yah!’ I was stunned and slightly frightened.

There’s a thrill in flying by the seat of your pants – trousers, actually: ‘pants’ in English means underwear – because most shows don’t operate that way. Network shows are repetitive.

TV is art. It’s mass art. It’s accessible to the masses.

I started acting professionally when I was about 17. I worked immediately, but a year into it, I did an independent film in Canada, and that started it all. It was proof that maybe I could do this as a career.

As I got into middle school, I was really an outcast. But everybody was an outcast in middle school. I don’t know who got the idea to put all kids going through puberty together in a school and give them academic elitism and competition and pit them against each other.

I just don’t know when, as a society… it sort of only became OK to represent gay people in the traditional sense, where they have a great job and well-adjusted parents and maybe a surrogate or adopted child. When was that the only way you could represent gay people?

I’m a bit of a geek, and I really like ‘Buffy.’

I consume a lot of television and a lot of movies, and I love watching other actors work and am just very inspired by it.

I’m a unique person, as everyone is, but none of us has more of a right to existence or a right to specialness or uniqueness than anyone else.

I do a bit of work on my bum, but, like, I don’t have a Dylan Bruce bum.

The artistic side of a person is never narcissist; it’s always empathic. It’s always kind and compassionate.

As an actor, you don’t want to know the beginning and end to your character’s arc. It makes it more fun. You’re not playing the end. You’re playing it realistically. You don’t know where this character is going to go and what’s going to happen to him, which just makes it more interesting for the viewers to watch.

Even in the face of tragedy, human beings need to find a way to laugh. It’s normal. It’s life.

From an acting standpoint, you’ve got to continue to trust your gut because, ultimately, only that will result in a better product, making the audience more happy and resulting in the right payoff.

I don’t win anything in life, you know what I mean? I was, like, the awkward kid who didn’t go to prom, but I did – nobody noticed, though.

I learned that the acting I really like is when the actors did a lot of bringing themselves, and where they’re at at the moment, to the character.

For ‘Orphan Black,’ all I got was the pilot script, and that was enough for me. I was daydreaming about this part. I kept thinking about how certain scenes were going to play out and how these interactions were going to take place.

I hope that one day, the world gets to a place where you don’t need to politicize your sexuality any more than someone needs to politicize their race – that we can just act and we can exist in this Zeitgeist, telling stories about one another.

I realized there’s a difference between creating a character and sustaining a character. The challenge that comes with sustaining a character is that you have this sudden impulse to think about all the things the audience liked.

Never stop training, no matter what level you’re at. Never, ever stop putting your talent under a microscope and asking, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah – I’m doing all this stuff right, but what’s wrong with my acting?’

Television is blue-collar work. You clock in in the morning; you work 12, 13 hours – sometimes 18 hours if you’re doing ‘Orphan Black.’

You cannot collectively, as a society, decide that you are only going to represent one part of a minority. It’s like saying you’ve represented black people on television because you aired an episode of the ‘Cosbys.’

I am full of optimism. The world hasn’t beaten it out of me yet. And I’m going to work very hard to make sure that they don’t.

Sometimes animal exercises can help you get in touch with parts of yourself that you don’t access day to day. In my day-to-day physicality, I’m a little bit like a terrier. I’ve always been described as a dog. I’m kind of goofy and a little dopey looking sometimes.

Toronto is actually way more fast-paced than L.A. – I find the fast-paced nature of Toronto a bit obtrusive. In L.A., I love getting up and going hiking and going to the beach – that’s L.A. culture and it’s awesome and I miss it. Toronto culture is wonderful, but I miss L.A.

I actually love woodworking. I’m just getting into it. And I love playing guitar, I’m a big movie aficionado, and I like hiking.

Women have always been incredible. They’ve always been amazing.

I think that the worst thing as an actor is to fall into a monotony with characters.

I love acting and will take all the time to continue to act. But sometimes I’d like to try my hand at directing.

I love Tom Wilkinson and Tommy Lee Jones as well as Jessica Chastain. But the person I look up to most, not because I identify with her roles but because of who she is as a person, is Sissy Spacek.