I don’t devalue comedy as compared to drama. Not one bit.
But what is drama? Broadly speaking, it is whatever by imitative action rouses interest or gives pleasure.
Getting to do what I think was my fifth BBC drama with Nikki Amuka-Bird – we’ve done ‘Shoot The Messenger,’ ‘Five Days,’ ‘The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency,’ ‘Born Equal’ and now ‘Small Island’ – was another highlight for me. And filming in Jamaica was great, too.
I was never really a nerd. I’m not really into comic books or Dungeons and Dragons or any of that kind of stuff. I was in drama class, and I’m a big movie and music buff. And I’m into sports.
I’ve done loads of things people have never seen – dramas on BBC4 and plays upstairs at the Royal Court and the Bush – and because I didn’t go to drama school, they gave me an education.
I got introduced to yoga in drama school. It’s now a mainstay in my life, ever since I got instructor certification at a teacher-training intensive. I even occasionally guide an intimate class of friends and family, but mostly the training was to serve and deepen my own practice.
I don’t buy into any of that hogwash. They put that out to sell tickets. It’s just a classic horror movie, with the Greek drama formula of good versus evil, and lots of fear.
Devin’s a drama queen.
Overall, the anarchy was the most creative of all periods of Japanese culture for in it there appeared the greatest landscape painting, the culmination of the skill of landscape gardening and the arts of flower arrangement, and the No drama.
I find myself gravitating towards drama. It interests me. In the books I read, the paintings I like, it’s always the darker stuff.
I’m from Mt. Clemens, Michigan. It’s right outside Detroit. The suburbs. I was always very heavily involved in theater back then. I was always in drama club or forensics. Anything that you could do that had some performing, I was doing it.
The Russian drama began at the end of 1991, when the Soviet Union mercifully ended. Russia and 14 other new countries emerged from the ruins of the Soviet Union. Every one of those 15 new states faced a profound historical, economic, financial, social and political challenge.
I really feel like the first day I went to drama school and I went up on stage, that I found my vocation. It’s kind of a cliched thing to say but I really feel like it was what I was meant to do.
Everyone loves good dressing room drama. But nothing beats main stage drama!
I had no idea what it took to be an actor. Then all of a sudden I found myself cast in a TV drama. The director was very harsh with me. One time, he told me this would be my first and last acting job. I seriously thought that acting was not the right career for me.
I think sports makes for good drama because it has all the same ingredients as anything worth reading or listening to or watching. Conflict, desire, heartbreak – it’s all there.
In the beginning of my career, all I did was drama, and I couldn’t get arrested doing comedy; nobody would hire me!
I don’t want to compare myself to him – I don’t want people to see me as this great genius – but when I see Charlie Chaplin’s movies there is a combination of drama, naivety and social meaning that I can see in myself, at a different level.
I am excited to be doing ‘SVU’ – I think there’s a lot of inherent drama and a lot of inherent conflict in procedural shows. I have a lot of respect for police officers and the work that they do. There’s a lot of nobility to depicting what these officers do on a day to day basis.
I’d love to do drama if it was interesting.
Our responsibility is to captivate you for however long we’ve asked for your attention. That said, there is tremendous drama to be gotten from the great, what you would say, heavy issues.
A lot of people who do drama say comedy is the hardest thing, but, not wanting to sound like a bighead, comedy is easy for me, as I’ve always been fairly funny.
I had always done theater in extracurricular ways. I’d never been a drama major.
I’d been wanting to work with James McAvoy since I was in drama school. I suppose there are parallels in that we’re Scottish, we went to the same drama school and share the same agent, but aside from that, he’s someone I’ve looked up to.
The wonderful thing about drama school is that it stretches you in a way the industry doesn’t.
I don’t do drama. I’m a comedian.
Violent drama has been a hallmark of every great civilization. It is not the cause of the disease – it is an immunizing factor. People go to the theater to experience emotions like fear and loathing. Violent drama shows us where we come from. It makes us face our hypocrisy.
We are not yet at the point where our size, our being the drama industry, is sufficient to support full time professional crews, and that is very very important.
I see myself as a performer and that applies to a Greek drama or a modern comedy.
I’m not a comedian. I can play off of people, but I’m not that guy. I don’t want people being like, ‘Yeah, he should have stuck with drama.’ It would not be my choice to have critics mumbling that.
The sixty-minute drama form has become very rich.
The thing a drama school can’t give you is instinct. It can sharpen instinct but that can’t be taught, and you have to have intuition. It’s an essential ingredient.
I think the American West really attracts me because it’s romantic. The desert, the empty space, the drama.
I noticed the drama majors on campus when I was at Notre Dame. They just seemed to be freer spirits than the rest of us. There was joy in their work; they were the only ones studying something whose work made them happy. I envied that.
I’m particularly drawn to actors in their own little drama. I find it’s that area I’m very alive to. And I don’t encounter it that often. You have to be far from civilization, you have to be far from New York or London to find people who do that.
You cannot have the drama without comedy.
For me, comedy and drama are all the same thing.
I have not forgotten about my dreams to become a singer. If given the chance, I want to take part in a drama OST making and also try out for musicals.
I was called Matt Dillon’s brother my whole career basically until ‘Entourage’ broke me free of that and now people call me Johnny Drama instead.
I do like reality shows, and I watch some of them because they’re high drama. It’s also just fun to watch people have honest reactions.
I tend to foster drama via bleakness. If I want the reader to feel sympathy for a character, I cleave the character in half, on his birthday. And then it starts raining. And he’s made of sugar.
I’m just trying to give the best human expression that I can to any particular genre, which could be comedy, could be drama, could be horror, could be thriller.
I began to feel that the drama of the truth that is in the moment and in the past is richer and more interesting than the drama of Hollywood movies. So I began looking at documentary films.
In the end, drama is successful if you care about the people.
Comedy and drama are less ageist media for women than stuff like light entertainment. But in TV or film, women have to be more pleasing on the eye than men.
From the beginning to the end of a drama, it’s most important that I’m focused on the project that I’m responsible for and feel affection towards it. Then I get faith that the project will end up being good before getting fully engaged in it.
I think a lot of drama, nowadays, is character-based and development-based, but ‘True Blood’ is very plot-oriented.
Forgive me, but what is the purpose of drama but catharsis?
When I was 16 years old, I joined a drama group called North Queensland Academy of Dramatic Art under a woman called Maggie Shephard-King. She inspired me to audition for the role of Romeo in ‘Romeo and Juliet.’
I think when people talk about lighter drama, they tend to use that term, not derogatorily, but ‘lighter’ means sort of less to a degree, but if you’re an actor, light drama is often mistaken for easier drama.
When I was young, you went to school, dealt with your friends and drama, went home, did your homework, went to bed, and started over the next day. But that social interaction that happens at school doesn’t end now – it goes until the minute you go to bed and starts again when you wake up.
I’ve done a lot of serious roles, but they’re, like, independent, so it’s harder for them to come out. The big ones have been comedies, but I would love to get a big drama to let people see the other side of me, that I am a serious actress.
There is a lot of hype about drama school, I think.
I’ve never done an actual Western, and I would love to do that. I’ve done drama and dark comedy stuff. I’ve never really done a romantic comedy either. I would do that.
The main question in drama, the way I was taught, is always, ‘What does the protagonist want?’ That’s what drama is. It comes down to that. It’s not about theme, it’s not about ideas, it’s not about setting, but what the protagonist wants.
Especially with a comedy, you’ve got the clear cut goal of trying to make a scene funny. It’s not like drama where you’re trying to achieve some kind of emotion or trying to further the story along. You’re trying to figure out what’s the funniest way to do something.
