I actually went to drama school at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music & Drama in Glasgow, so I stayed in my home town the whole time. However, I see more of my friends now than I did then. It’s strange.
When I speak of drama, I’m really referring to just ‘desperately trying not to be ordinary’. Trying to get something that has a little bit of friction, conflict, absurdity.
In my first year at drama school, I did this kids’ show called ‘Let’s See.’
Comedy and drama are both challenging to me.
I’ve always said that with kids’ TV that people get stuck in it from drama school but that’s not fair because I know myself that when you go in creatively, kids are so much more open to ideas. You’re so much freer to mess about and try things.
In my opinion, the most significant works of the twentieth century are those that rise beyond the conceptual tyranny of genre; they are, at the same time, poetry, criticism, narrative, drama, etc.
I’ve always done drama, but I suppose ‘Tyrannosaur’ was a bit of a watershed moment for me. It was like when Kathy Burke did ‘Nil By Mouth’ – suddenly, people were saying, ‘Oh, she can do that, too.’
And you know, whether it’s drama or comedy, the best work is based on truth. It’s just that, with comedy, the circumstances are just crazy-heightened, and you have these crazy things thrown at you. But you still have to do it truthfully, because that’s where the humor comes from. So it’s not that difficult to cross over.
I like to see love stories: romantic comedy or romantic drama.
I would love to do a serious period drama. Oh, absolutely. I mean, you’ll find most comedians want to do more serious stuff, most musicians want to be comedians, and most serious actors want to be musicians.
I think drama in schools shouldn’t be about, ‘Let’s put ‘Annie’ on this year’ – not that there’s anything wrong with that – but it’s a good way of getting kids to interact, and it can be a good communication tool.
I don’t think rap really fits in to ‘American Idol’ in the sense that I believe rap is an art form in itself more akin to poetry, more akin to drama, if you will.
Particularly for English people, Shakespeare is always at the forefront of both drama and the English language. He’s always been there. I can’t remember starting school and not learning about him.
There are so many people that say they are actors and they don’t spend for 5 minutes a day working on their craft. You need to train and need to take classes to keep your tools sharp. I’m always in class, whether it’s theater or drama workshops.
I don’t think anything connects with an audience as deeply as a long-form serialized drama, and much as I love television, I’ve always found a good ongoing comics series to be much more immersive.
I was just lucky enough to grow up in a time when they actually had drama departments in schools.
I love gritty drama. I’m passionate about films and drama that make you think – hard-hitting, gravelly characters.
To my family and friends, I’m very definitely a clown. But do you know what? Doing a drama would almost seem easy because I wouldn’t need to find that gag in a line.
I think if I had come out of drama school and been an instant Hollywood superstar, I would be taking long, leisurely holidays.
I couldn’t afford to go to drama school in London. Then I met with the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama in Glasgow, and I fell in love with the city. It was one of the few schools that offered me a place. It didn’t do me any harm.
I wasn’t a sweet kid. I was an instigator and provoked everyone with my goofy hyena cackle, loving every minute of the drama I could create.
My favorite play in drama school was ‘The Bacchae.’ It’s about a king who literally gets eaten alive by all the women in the play in a kind of orgy – it’s related to the word ‘bacchanal’ – and I loved that idea of animalistic chaos and following our own desires.
The drama may be called that part of theatrical art which lends itself most readily to intellectual discussion: what is left is theater.
With a contained environment, there is the promise of friction. And that is where the drama comes from.
With comedy, it’s a combination of knowing the comedic beat was good – it made you laugh, it made people on the crew laugh. With drama, you do something deep and if your stuff was really effective, the ultimate result is silence. Silence is not necessarily… that would also be the result if you sucked.
I teach people that no matter what the situation is, no matter how chaotic, no matter how much drama is around you, you can heal by your presence if you just stay within your center.
I love walking down the street and seeing faces and drama and happiness and sadness and dirt and cleanliness.
I suppose I walk that line between comedy and cruelty because I think one illuminates the other. We’re all cruel, aren’t we? We are all extreme in one way or another at times and that’s what drama, since the Greeks, has dealt with.
When you’re the lead actor in a drama, you have 2 1/2 months at the end of a season to do other projects, and everything has to get done in that time.
I want to do theatre and I want to do period drama.
The floor of the U.S. Senate isn’t a place that usually sees a lot of drama.
When I did ‘Battlestar Galactica’ it was the first time I really understood science fiction. That was a very political drama, but set in spaceships so people didn’t really take it seriously. But some really fascinating things were explored in that.
‘Confederate,’ in all of our minds, will be an alternative-history show. It’s a science-fiction show. One of the strengths of science fiction is that it can show us how this history is still with us in a way no strictly realistic drama ever could, whether it were a historical drama or a contemporary drama.
I’ve done a lot of costume drama and theatre – the National Theatre and In fact, most of my work at the theatre, at the National Theatre anyway, was period.
The stoic drama ‘A Somewhat Gentle Man’ is photographed in a palate of steel gray tones that match Stellan Skarsgard’s complexion. It’s a low-blood-pressure version of the kind of thing James M. Cain used to do in his sleep, and its filmmaking accomplishment is as minimalist as its narrative ambition is minimal.
There’s something to play if there’s conflict going on. Whatever that conflict is, that’s where drama is; if the character is grappling with something you’ve got something to play, there’s layers to it.
In the theatrical works we love and admire the most, the ending of the drama generally takes place offstage.
If it wasn’t for my drama teacher, I wouldn’t be here right now.
Well, opera began with an intent to resuscitate Greek drama, that is, modern opera as we know it.
Encouraging young people to believe in themselves and find their own voice whether it’s through writing, drama or art is so important in giving young people a sense of self-worth.
When I was at drama school, I was totally broke, and a lot of my mates had jobs and were financially very good to me, so if, for example, I take them away on a trip to a football match in Europe, it means that I can pay them back a bit.
Religion enabled society to organise itself to debate goodness, just as Greek drama had once done.
Every child should have time for arts, music, sports, drama, robotics, school newspapers and the like, not to mention recess and play.
I was supposed to go to drama school and then go to New York and do theatre. But I grew up on all those fabulous movies and had read all the bold Hollywood books, and I thought I just had to take a look.
It’s not some big event that creates the drama, it’s the little things of everyday life that bring about that drama.
You cannot say, because I am from Naples so I like the mixture of drama and comedy all together.
I like period drama because everyone is so restrained, but they have all these emotions raging underneath.
The Jewish festival of freedom is the oldest continuously observed religious ritual in the world. Across the centuries, Passover has never lost its power to inspire the imagination of successive generations of Jews with its annually re-enacted drama of slavery and liberation.
As a young actor, I would be invited to the CBC radio drama department to do voices for different characters, and I found that I could do quite a few of them. I wasn’t a visual presence, and I found it easier to construct a voice from the written page.
I went to university in the north of England at University of Birmingham to do an English literature degree, and I knew I could do extracurricular stuff with theater and drama. I started a theater company, called Article 19, and I did it with a bunch of friends. I wrote and directed plays. I had a radio show.
When I was younger and studying acting, I never ever saw myself in the sitcom world; it was drama that really turned me on and still does.
The rules of drama are very much separate from the properties of life. I think that’s especially true of Shakespeare.
Elvis’ early music has drama because as he sang he was escaping limits.
I think the way WWE Studios is going now – they’re going away from action, doing more drama, more comedy – it will open a lot of people’s eyes. Because a lot of people see big guy, big frame: action superstar. We’ve proven, especially with ‘Legendary,’ that that is not always the case.
