Comedy, at least the way I write comedy, is just drama with jokes.
I’ve always been a bit of a drama queen. I was into make-believe and dressing up.
You have to go to the ultimate situation in drama.
They put me in the drama class, and that’s the path I’ve taken.
You know, we’ve got to this place, where you go to a movie for one particular surgical fix. So, it’s like, I want the pulse-pounding action, or the insane falling-off-my-seat comedy, or the devastating, heart-breaking drama.
I think this orchestra’s strengths involve drama and voice.
In an action film you act in the action. If it’s a dramatic film you act in the drama.
So many reality shows are scripted and create this fake drama, and it’s a bunch of bull. We wanted to do something real and something wholesome and something that’s focused on positive family values.
I was always interested in the arts as a child – drawing, painting, and piano – but acting became a favourite. I was a major theatre geek in high school – if I wasn’t in the drama room at lunch rehearsing, I’d be in the art room finishing up some type of project.
The wound-tight, travel-light Obama has a distaste for the adversarial and the random. But if you stick too rigidly to a ‘No Drama’ rule in the White House, you risk keeping reality at bay. Presidencies are always about crisis management.
But I majored in Drama, modified with Psychology.
In the end, it’s acting, it’s not real. But every director will tell you that you have to create conditions that create tension, because tension is what makes drama feel real.
I’ve got four piercings in my left, so we’ve dubbed my right one the ‘period drama ear.’ I have to be filmed from that side when I do emotional close-ups in ‘Downton.’
When you start getting jobs, and see your mates from drama school, you don’t really want to talk about it, because you have this innate sense of guilt that it’s not fair that others aren’t doing exactly what you’re doing. I do have that.
Neither my MFA from Yale School of Drama nor my BFA from the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University make me any different from other actors in film, television, or theatre.
I always try to create conflict and drama in my books; it’s the engine of the novel.
There’s something that goes on in a new-business meeting that’s wonderful to watch. It’s like showtime. There are people who are nervous, and there are people who are jittery, and there’s so much drama and so much at stake.
We are all equal children before our mother; and India asks each one of us, in whatsoever role we play in the complex drama of nation-building, to do our duty with integrity, commitment and unflinching loyalty to the values enshrined in our Constitution.
Christianity makes of life a moral drama in which we play a starring role and in which the most ordinary events take on a grand significance.
In Britain, the theatre has traditionally been where the public goes to think about its past and debate its future. The formation of the National Theatre, at the Old Vic, near the South Bank, in 1963, institutionalized the symbolic importance of drama by giving it both a building and state funding.
There is an odd sense of responsibility attached to appearing in a drama about a real piece of history. A work of fiction is fun.
I love Frances McDormand so much. I love her career. And I think it’s fun because she gets to do comedy as well as drama.
After graduating from flares and platforms in the early 1970s, I started drama school wearing a pair of khaki dungarees with one of my Dad’s Army shirts, accessorised by a cat’s basket doubling as a handbag. Very Lady Gaga.
I have yet to see a drama that puts forward women who are successful and also have a family… they are nearly always seen as victims.
Baseball is drama with an endless run and an ever-changing cast.
But a true diva has dismissed that drama. A true diva’s heart is open, and she’s ready to play by her own rules – rules that are gentle and kind.
I know what it’s like to struggle for cash. When I went to drama school, I worked as a chambermaid to make ends meet.
No matter how many modern parts I do, people still refer to me as Mrs. Costume Drama. Fight Club is a studio pic, and I’ve done very few of those. I’ve got a feeling it’s going to change things for me.
Those years between drama school and getting onto the stand-up circuit were pretty lean.
You’re playing a character in a drama who happens to be based on someone who existed. It’s never going to ‘be’ that person, but it’s based on someone well-known, and you want to create enough of that person for it not to be a distraction.
Whether I’m acting or making it, at the end of the day it’s telling the story; action, drama. You want the audience to feel it – the story, the action, the scene, or a particular shot. I just keep working on crafting my art, on how to make action movies.
Being a kid and growing up is such a cool part of life. When you’re young, you have no worries, no drama, only your imagination. It’s the best!
We called ‘Heavy Rain’ an interactive drama, for whatever that’s worth.
When I came to know theater, drama became valuable to me.
A handful of works in history have had a direct impact on social policy: one or two works of Dickens, some of Zola, ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ and, in modern drama, Larry Kramer’s ‘The Normal Heart.’
In all my movies, there’s always a kind of heartfelt element, to be able to do a drama and to be able to spend more time in the emotional stuff with no pressure to get back to the funny that’s very liberating for me.
It is not because I do not love my adopted land – it is the natural feeling of one far from home, who remembers those happy, carefree days when life flowed at full tide, without responsibility, flashing past one like the drama in a fascinating story of adventure and romance.
It has nothing to do with the emotional demands of a role; I’ve done comedies that are as draining to me as any drama.
This is real human drama, we’re not creating some amusement park ride for the summer. Even though the movie is really exciting to watch, it’s got a real pathos behind it.
Women and minorities have excelled beautifully in comedy, but very few women are the lead in a drama.
The drama is a great revealer of life.
Drama is not hard for me. It just didn’t seem hard.
When I first got out of drama school, my original manager tried to get me to change my name because people were having trouble spelling it and saying it.
I was acting since I was a kid, going to drama classes and being involved in every school play and musical that I could get my hands on, so it was something that was a part of me from a very early age.
Most drama in our lives is really rather squalid.
I was on the cheerleading squad and drama and the choir, but I was friends with everybody. I was not a partier. I was too Type A and crazy about my grades, but I was still there at everything.
I didn’t go to drama school to be a musical theatre performer. I enjoyed it, but I didn’t go to do that; I went to be an actor.
‘Dark Blue’ is ultimately a gritty crime drama, at its core. I don’t think that is ever going to change.
I think that comedy really tells you how it is. The other thing about comedy is that – you don’t even know if you’re failing in drama, but you do know when you’re failing in comedy. When you go to a comedy and you don’t hear anybody laughing, you know that you’ve failed.
With drama, you know if you’re having a true moment, but in comedy, if somebody doesn’t laugh, then you know you’re not being funny. That’s a really fun challenge, and that’s what draws me to comedy.
I actually find it harder to act in the scenes where there’s not much happening, say having a milkshake in the diner. That is far harder to do than straight scenes where there’s a drama going on and you have something to do.
As God has not made anything useless in this world, as all beings fulfill obligations or a role in the sublime drama of Creation, I cannot exempt from this duty, and small though it be, I too have a mission to fill, as for example: alleviating the sufferings of my fellowmen.
So I majored in Drama, did all the plays that were possible to do, skated through school in order to be in every production on stage or backstage in whatever capacity and I came to New York looking for work in the summers.
Culture clash is terrific drama.
I try to bring the audience’s own drama – tears and laughter they know about – to them.
There’s a film I did called ‘Front of the Class’, about a teacher who had Tourette’s. That was a beautiful blend of drama and comedy. There’s some great moments of levity in the script.
I love romantic films and love drama. Any film that has romance or romantic element is my comfort.
Soaps are one of the few areas on TV that really embrace older women. In drama, there’s this ridiculous invisibility for women between the ages of 40 and 60. Unless you’re old enough to play a grandmother, there just aren’t the roles.
I only really started to go to plays and to be interested in drama 20 years ago when as an artist I was already well-rounded. I think I’m more disciplined today.
There’s real drama in performing live. You never know how it’s going to be.
