Top 30 Rory OMalley Quotes

I can’t believe women walk around in stilettos. I would not make it two steps.

I was eight when I played St. Joseph, and I told my mom from that moment on I wanted to be an actor.

Being a kid and growing up in Cleveland, the Tonys were how you saw Broadway shows: you got to hear from each show, and that’s what inspired me to live my dream, so the fact that I am getting recognition from them, it’s mind-blowing.

You can win your Oscar, and you still wake up trying to figure out how to get your next job.

I always thought I would move to New York after graduation, but, instead, I moved to Los Angeles. I realized I was more scared of that choice than I was of New York, and I thought, at 22, I should get it over with.

The theatre community is so powerful.

You need to be happy with or without an acting job.

I love how passionate Elder McKinley is about his faith, but he’s a perfectionist in a bad way… to the point he denies his true feelings. It’s a common story, unfortunately.

You can’t waste time in your life trying to hide the truth.

‘Hamilton’ is a game-changer for the musical theater genre. It’s moved the art form forward so much and redefined so many things about what we do in theater, so it’s pretty hard to oversell it.

Kelsey Grammer and Martin Lawrence are such legends.

We cannot give up on working toward that more perfect union.

Elder McKinley wants his homosexuality to be turned off. To be a perfect Mormon, he has to put his feelings away.

I’m an actor first and foremost. But I’ve also started an organization, Broadway Impact, that advocates for marriage equality. I’m an actorvist.

It’s profound to watch a little African-American girl light up when she raps as George Washington and she realizes that Washington’s story is her story. That this history belongs to all of us.

There are a lot of other work forces that don’t do things the way the Broadway community does.

My mom was a single mother. She had six siblings in a big Irish family, all descended from shanty Irish folks who arrived after the Famine. They settled along the Cuyahoga River. It’s the river that caught on fire. We’re real good at picking real estate.

The ‘Cheers’ family seemed like my family.

Pub life was such a huge part of growing up for me, going to pubs and being around them. It made me who I am today.

Irish music in the local pubs was my first exposure to musical expression, and I feel like Irish music is very close to musical theater because it is always telling a story.

As someone who was once in the closet, I can tell you it is the most sad, dark, awful, depressing place to ever be.

There comes a point when you have to be more than an actor, and doing something else that means a lot to me has actually made me a stronger actor. It’s stimulated something else in my brain and heart.

I played Sky Masterson in ‘Guys and Dolls’ at St. Ignatius. I walked out onstage at one point looking for Nathan Detroit, and I’m supposed to say, ‘Has anyone seen Nathan Detroit?’ But, instead, I said, ‘Has anyone seen Sky Masterson?’ I immediately realized what I’d done, so I said, ‘Wait a minute. I’m Sky Masterson!’

Growing up in bars might sound like child abuse. And if it does, then you’re what my mom would call ‘Protestants.’

I loved ‘Les Miz’ and ‘Into the Woods’ – I used to cast ‘Into the Woods’ with my friends, even if they’d never stepped on stage before.

I obsessively listened to all of James Lapine’s shows as a child growing up in Cleveland and had every cast recording and every VHS tape of ‘Into the Woods’ and everything that James had done that I could get my hands on.

The only way to get to that next peak is to be ready for that next valley. Being raised Irish, you know to always be ready for the bad times.

Los Angeles is where I became an actor.

Life comes before the business.

When I came out, I thought coming out meant giving up a marriage and a family. That was, to me, the most difficult part of the coming-out process.