I had the training at drama school where I studied Shakespeare and Brecht and Chekov and all these period historical playwrights and I think that I responded to the material.
A lot of the major players in the 1960s were the same as the 1940s and 1950s – Hitchen’s ‘Sleep with Slander.’ Armstong’s ‘Lemon in the Basket,’ which is a fusion of the political assassination thriller and a family drama. And Hughes’s ‘The Expendable Man.’
The drama teacher that I had in high school, back in Texas, was the only teacher who didn’t kick me out of his class. He turned me on to ‘The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan.’ I had picked up Dylan with ‘Bringing It All Back Home,’ and he turned me on to the first couple of albums, which I hadn’t heard.
In England, when we’re at drama school, we spend a lot of time learning the craft from playwrights and stage actors, who are very well trained in the basics of acting because they need to get it right the first time – you can’t have second or third takes when you’re in front of a live audience, unlike in film.
I don’t hold any candle for drama versus comedy.
A cosmic war is like a ritual drama in which participants act out on Earth a battle they believe is actually taking place in the heavens.
That straight man character is a short trip between comedy and drama in a project, so I can play the comedic beat on the same page as a dramatic beat. It gives me a lot of freedom as an actor to play scenes in multiple ways because I don’t play the clown, nor do I play someone who is particularly maudlin.
It just seems like the most successful, iconic love stories are not so easy or escapist. I think the ones that stay with us and resonate are full of conflict, discord and misunderstandings ’cause that’s what makes drama happen or tension even if it’s a comedy.
When I was younger, Big Bang didn’t go on many variety programs, so we used to try and plan many fun events for our concert, like drama parodies, which Korean fans enjoyed.
People want performers, personality and drama, and you got that in the .
‘Heirs’ is really a good drama. Everyone put out their heart and soul into this series, from the actors to the whole staff. That’s why I think we won awards for this drama.
I also love the makers of South Park, because they’re political, strong, and they’re making all of these comments that would get you shot for if you did it in a drama.
I was a drama teacher, so I had the opportunity to show off in front of a captive audience. I essentially did 13 years of stand-up. Whether my pupils would agree that I was remotely interesting or not is another question.
I love a bit of drama. That’s a bad thing. I can flip really quickly.
All they teach you in drama school is how to do stage fights and be a pain in rehearsals.
At some point in time, you definitely have to go drama. Not to say that you’re going drama just because everybody else does it. You do it to challenge yourself. You do it because, naturally, in the profession of acting, you want to show growth. You want to say that you take the craft seriously.
I am a drama queen!
I think it’s actually a misperception that I am a comedic actress. I do more drama than comedy but very little of it has been seen. When you are in big funny movies and they do well and your little part in it kind of explodes people perceive you as a comedian.
I did drama school in Delhi. I am glad I studied in a school where cultural activities were significant.
Doing a sitcom is like doing a play – you rehearse for three or four days, and then you shoot what you rehearsed on Friday night in front of an audience. An hour-long drama is like shooting a movie. You’re shooting 13-14 hour days. The endurance itself is different.
Sitcom hours are silly easy compared to drama. Whenever an actor on a sitcom complains, I feel like smacking them!
I love going back and forth from drama to comedy. I love switching it around and showing people that I can do both.
My natural accent is American. I chose to speak with a U.K. accent when I was about to enter the final year at drama school in London. I was going to try to find a way to stay in the U.K. after I finished college and could not imagine trying to live and get work there with an American accent.
I’m still fighting really hard to get any role I get. If it’s comedy, I go for the laughs. And if it’s drama, I try to tell the truth, and try to play the real stakes of whatever scenario the character’s in.
I’m a fan of daytime drama; I totally get it. When we are doing scenes that are romantic or will get the audience riled up, I feel like I’m a fan in the room going, ‘People are going to be so mad right now!’
There’s no way around it – drama is very difficult to shoot. It’s very heavy and something that you carry with you for the course of the day.
I want to do drama, light comedy, the whole range.
Normally our season is seven weeks in the Drama Theatre and four weeks in the Opera Theater.
I think the point to be understood is that we’re all different. I’ve never been a fan of theories of acting. I didn’t go to drama school, so I was never put through a training that was limited by someone saying, ‘This is the way you should act.’
When I read great literature, great drama, speeches, or sermons, I feel that the human mind has not achieved anything greater than the ability to share feelings and thoughts through language.
When I become a character in a movie or drama… I can think about the character only and not the complicated matters of my own life.
If I had gone to drama school, I wouldn’t be sitting here now because it would have blanded me out; it would have just turned me into another actor.
You’d be hard pressed to find more drama in ‘Days of Our Lives’ than you do in an average job each day.
The wonderful drama teacher at my high school, Barbara Patterson, saw me standing in the hall and told me I should audition for ‘West Side Story.’ I guess she thought I looked like a gang member.
The western is the simplest form of drama – a gun, death.
As an actor, the first thing you learn in drama school is you never judge.
The narration, in fact, doubles the drama with a commentary without which no mise en scene would be possible.
There is hardly a pioneer’s hut which does not contain a few odd volumes of Shakespeare. I remember reading the feudal drama of Henry V for the first time in a log cabin.
Comedy has to do with holding and releasing tension; it’s very technical. It’s more technical than drama.
I think if you turn down the volume on the good comedy, you should not even know if it’s a comedy or not. It should look like a drama.
Heroes in drama are people who try hard to reach a virtuous ideal. And whether they succeed or fail really doesn’t matter – it’s the trying that counts.
Of the people who cook on television, I have admired people like Jacques Pepin, Julia Child, Mario Batali, Jamie Oliver and a few others because they are free of drama, display good taste and masterful technique, and use clear exposition to bring you up to speed.
Matt Bomer and I went to Carnegie Mellon for drama together.
The quality of TV drama nowadays is getting better and better. They’ve had to invent a new term for it: ‘high-end television.’
I think a lot of the instincts you have doing comedy are really the same for doing drama, in that it’s essentially about listening. The way I approach comedy, is you have to commit to everything as if it’s a dramatic role, meaning you play it straight.
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.
I’d been gearing up to working in theatre since coming out of drama school, but it was an exciting time for TV drama – it was the birth of Channel 4, and Brookside was very cutting-edge at the time.
At 13, in my first year of Tonbridge, I went up for the part of Macbeth. I was up against the 17- and 18-year-olds, but for some reason I got the part. It made me incredibly unpopular with my peers, but it was the English and drama teachers who stepped in to save me when others wanted me kicked out of the school.
Drama is easier to do because you just have to have the emotion and not get caught acting, but comedy is much harder.
Comedy has always been more challenging for me than drama.
Drama is about conflict, and it’s about putting obstacles in the path of people you who care about.
What I’m trying to do is find either existing properties or come up with properties or angles or stories which will create music drama. It’s my obsession and most of all I would like to remain working in theatre. I think it’s very much alive.
I did a lot of serious plays, and I did the Oxford Review as well, which is supposed to be funny, but I’m not sure how funny we were when we did it. Then, when I finished my course, it was only then that I decided to go to drama school and try and do acting because I was enjoying it so much and so on.
I always do drama. It’s just that some people laugh at it and some people cry.
‘The Tudors’ was ground-breaking in the sense that it did ruffle the feathers of classical historians and alter the way people did period drama at the time.
It’s fun to do a comedy and hook people in and then hoodwink them into watching a serious movie. I like to lead in with the comedy and then hit them over the head with a drama.
