Top 55 Omari Hardwick Quotes

I kept on hearing the voice of God saying if you are going to be the minister that your mom mentioned… then you have to act. My pulpit is acting.

Poetry has, in a way, been my bridge to my acting career.

What we have as artists is the immortalization opportunity that others don’t have, because our work is lasting; it’s there forever to view.

I don’t make a big deal out of playing football at UGA to people who have interviewed me.

I always had an interest in telling stories.

Craft is everything.

As an actor, I come to set, and I have already broken the character down by writing a poem about the character. I try to write in his voice, the way he would write it.

Know that the tattoos are all significant. They’re all extremely insignificant. I can’t break each one down, but it’s 20 years. The first one was 21 years of age from a football teammate.

For me, music was a cathartic way to free me from the nut of Ghost. After working on set for ‘Power’ for 14 hours, it allowed me to pour my sanity and insanity into the music.

Like anybody who grew up in the Eighties, I cringe at the thought of these movies being remade, because of the corniness and cheesiness of the originals.

Women are so necessary for us in terms of support.

I’m addicted to the hotel life. It’s humbling and fly at the same time.

The way the recession has affected Hollywood, a lot of actors that had robust opportunities before in film no longer have such plum options, so cable has done a good job of becoming a happy medium for artists deemed film actors.

I think the universe just brings people around others they find to be interesting.

I’m safe where I’m at just being the guy where people go, ‘That’s a really good actor. What’s his name again?’ I liked being at that place.

You know, I think anybody who has been in relationships has access to heartbreak – I don’t think we have to go far to find it, whether we inflicted the heartbreak or whether we were the recipient of it.

I think actors make for very good directors, and I would like to do that one day.

We are a total of our sum parts, right? I came from a family of very strong women – black women. And if I go back as far as my great grandmothers, there was always that love and the ability to be nurturing. Then I grew up in a household where my father was the one who was more affectionate with me.

I use Aveeno cleansers and moisturizers.

When it’s all said and done, I am secure enough with my manhood to say to the world, ‘I am a male actor, and its okay for me to play a gay man.’

I’d done ‘Peter Pan’ in a little pre-K class or whatever.

I was definitely a Daddy’s boy.

I don’t think you really have chemistry in the way that you want between two actors unless frustration is there as well.

I was at a ballpark as much as I was in school. I was on a basketball court or football field as much as I was in school, so I definitely was receiving mentorship when it came to coaches, my father, my grandfather, and my uncles.

Spike Lee gave me the greatest reaction to the fact that I was this athlete-meets-artist, because I think he saw that I was different. I learned that oftentimes, Spike directs in a sense that he might just stare at you and look at you in a telepathic way of communicating.

I was at UGA playing with Champ Bailey and Hines Ward – both guys who will probably touch the Hall of Fame one day.

I’d say my artistic bent definitely came from my father, who was a trial lawyer. And if you’re smart, you know that a trial lawyer isn’t that different from an actor. He was a poet as well.

I come from the stage, so I started in New York, lived there for eleven years.

I’m such a carnivorous researcher as an actor – I chew it up like it’s meat, and I really don’t know how to do that without the people that are producing or creating or writing that which they want me to chew up.

I was trying to pay the bills with poems, and it was easy to memorize my poems, because I’d be riding my bike in California trying to memorize them before going on stage at a poetry lounge.

Real to Reel is a rare opportunity for new filmmakers to screen their work for industry insiders.

I found poetry at 12 and 13 and, lo and behold, learned that my attorney father had a background in poetry – as he wore dashikis and Afros in the ’70s and named his kids Arabic names. He was a poet and a lot like The Last Poets and Gil Scott-Heron and all of these folks. He definitely was an artist.

I know that Donald Trump is a smart man.

I didn’t want to just do a show where my character stood out and other characters were flat or one-to-two-dimensional. I wanted everybody to have meat.

When I think about the person who’s been most in my ear, it’s Joe Dumars.

I’ve definitely had my moments in relationships where I’ve been able to say yes, I have been heartbroken, my heart has been broken.

You know how you can be romantic? You can be romantic by going to a beautiful setting, sitting on a park bench, and getting good ole-fashioned golden arches, a.k.a. McDonald’s. That’s probably the best I can do romantically.

I’m a black Catholic raised in Decatur, Georgia, which was very gang-infested. Then, I went to an all-white private high school and excelled in sports and wrote poetry, then played football at the University of Georgia, minoring in drama.

I would say, as loving as I am… I am definitely an extremely temperamental man who has a very large temper.

I think I’m an athlete who’s trained as an actor, and when you smash it all together, you get whatever Omari is doing as a performer right now.

If you remain open to great directors who look like you, who know what they’re doing and are making impactful films that are destroying these ‘blockbuster films,’ you can do okay, and everybody can get more of a piece of the pie. But you’ve got to be open and brave.

I grew up in a two-parent household. We all played sports, all sports, which cost a lot of money. My pops was an attorney; he went to College of the Holy Cross with Clarence Thomas. My mom worked a bit, then gradually came home and took care of us full time.

Unlike many Californians or New Yorkers, college football is a religion down south.

It’s rare for artists to really stare deeply at themselves in the mirror, literally, because there’s constantly a mirror on you.

When you start out on a project as an actor, you know, you approach the character from the standpoint of maybe writing a list – even if it’s a mental list that you make – of the adjectives that the character has or that character possesses.

I did ‘Fences’ off-broadway at the Beacon Theater, so it’s amazing that Denzel Washington and Viola Davis brought it to Broadway.

I always have a backpack. I was a poet, so it reminds me of being a backpack poet.

That’s the thing with me being a former athlete: in the way I attack characters and attack poetry is from the base of being an athlete.

There were uncles in my life that definitely knew the street life.

You can’t look at the dollar and say, ‘I’m not what I dreamed of being unless I do this type of movie and it’s a blockbuster that gives me this amount of dollars.’ That’s not good.

I tend to want to put my fingers over my ears and not hear all of that, not hear that there are so many fans.

It’s really rare to come across a character, a show, or a movie that allows you to completely play four or five different characters within a season, let alone a week.

That point of life when I learned I could cook, that always made me understand what cooks felt like feeding other people. It’s okay to receive, but it’s really cool to give, so food is to me sexy because it’s the fact that someone is giving it to someone else.

I got in trouble for saying I would move my family to Europe, but I said it.

If I could remake any Eighties project, it would be less an action flick than a character-driven drama with a rich story to tell.