I always loved acting and improv and sketch comedy and theater, which I did at a local youth theater.
When I’m acting, I’m two beings. There’s the one monitoring the distance between myself and the camera, making sure I hit my marks, and there is the one driven by this inner fire, this delicious fear.
I don’t consider myself just a rapper or just a singer. I’m a music producer, lyricist. I’m a poet as well, and acting is also a part of big entertainment.
More than in any other performing arts the lack of respect for acting seems to spring from the fact that every layman considers himself a valid critic.
Comedians like to see people smile. With acting, I love giving people a feeling, an emotion. I like to give people a feeling. When they come away from my scene, I want them to think.
I’ve personally never wanted to be ‘the babe’, and refuse to let vanity get in the way of my acting because I don’t see my job as being a beautiful person.
The Irish Catholic side was married to the life of an actor and I found out acting could be a form of prayer.
I’m not acting, but I am acting.
I realized on my first day on set of ‘Miss Potter’ that there wasn’t going to be anything else that could make me as happy or feel as fulfilled as acting does.
I know very little about acting. I’m just an incredibly gifted faker.
I remember once acting really cool on a bus with this girl named Stephanie. When I got home, I realized that I had a really big zit on my forehead. If you have acne problems, you really shouldn’t be acting like Don Juan.
I remember when I was about 18, Sean Penn made a bet with me. He had just directed his first movie, and he’s like, ‘By the time you’re 30, I will bet you $500 that you’ll be sick of acting.’ I’m still waiting to collect, because I’m not.
We were over in Europe all the time their posters were up. That’s why I liked them. So now all of a sudden they’re going to get a band hat on, and say people aren’t acting the right way?
My acting career began when I walked into a drama school class run by Anna Scher in Islington. Anna discovered a lot of people: Linda Robson, Pauline Quirke, Gary and Martin Kemp, and Dexter Fletcher were among my contemporaries.
The hardest thing about ‘Mulan’ is to put yourself in that circumstance and to have the answer be organic, and not be acting.
I grew up in New York, so I fell in love with acting on a stage, not in front of a camera.
Acting has given me a way to channel my angst. I feel like an overweight, pimply faced kid a lot of the time – and finding a way to access that insecurity, and put it toward something creative is incredibly rewarding. I feel very lucky.
I guess what I enjoy most is directing, because it incorporates all aspects of filmmaking. Directing is in the same line as acting – both are popularity contests, and in both you’re trying to tell a story through the film as a medium.
Acting is a freelance career… you never stop having to prove yourself and fight for work.
I had a really great experience so far with film acting. And most experiences from most actors, I’ve heard, are not like this. But I want a career that has many disciplines and many options.
Actors walk around wearing these little tool-belts of acting skills. And I just don’t find that interesting to watch. I never want to see someone who clearly can cry at the drop of a hat. That’s so uninteresting.
I would be the worst acting coach ever, because I have no idea what I’m doing.
I’m involved in some action scenes, so they’ll train me for that. I’ll be working with my acting coach to prepare for my character.
I’m really not interested in acting as a facade, I’m interested in it as an emotional expression and as a transcendent experience for an individual. I find that a lot of people, a lot of young actors, haven’t gotten to the point where they’re comfortable being stripped down. They’re still interested in ornate jackets.
The actor cannot afford to look only to his own life for all his material nor pull strictly from his own experience to find his acting choices and feelings.
Fortunately, I never had to do the waiter thing. When I got out of college, I immediately started to teach acting. One of the first jobs I had was in a federally-funded program where I taught drama to young people.
I only really discovered modelling in August 2014 when I went to the Royal Queensland Show in Brisbane and watched a fashion parade. At that moment, I decided it looked like an awesome thing to do. Before then, my spare time was competing at Special Olympics, dancing, and acting.
I try to be a hard boiled sometimes. My kids see right through it. I’m acting. It’s always, ‘When I say you’ll be back at 11, that means 11, not 11.15. Do you hear me!?’ Then, ‘Yeah, Dad.’
I have only one rule in acting – trust the director and give him heart and soul.
I love hearing about bad behavior. It’s just so funny to me. Especially, grown ups acting like weird, inconsolable babies over really stupid things, to me, is really funny.
I don’t find acting to be a particularly noble way to make a living. I’m not saving anybody’s life, I’m not a teacher, I’m not working for UNICEF. I don’t think I’m some big deal.
Acting, to me, is about the incredible adventure of examining the landscape of human heart and soul. That’s basically what we do.
Fishing is very meditative; you need to be able to give up control and cast out the line and then hope for the best, so in that way, it’s quite like acting.
Acting is about going into the space, and there are just some places that I’m not willing to go.
I had an acting teacher tell me once that if you’re playing a car salesman, you don’t want to be an OK car salesman, you want to play the best car salesman.
Acting is the perfect idiot’s profession.
Acting is playing pretend, playing a children’s game at an adult level, but with children’s rules. It’s fun to play bad guys. I’ve never been in a fight in my life, so it’s fun to play something that’s different.
To get on a show where you’re acting day in and day out for many, many hours – 15-16 hours sometimes – it hones your endurance, your ability to memorize, your ability to follow your instincts, because you don’t have time to fret about your choices afterward.
Pay in the acting world hasn’t kept up with inflation.
Acting isn’t really a creative profession. It’s an interpretative one.
The political machine triumphs because it is a united minority acting against a divided majority.
Acting is the expression of a neurotic impulse. It’s a bum’s life. Quitting acting, that’s the sign of maturity.
Acting is like any other art form, in that you have the option to go very big or go very small.
I think when you take away all, like, the premieres and press stuff and all the special effects, then you just come down to the fact that it’s all about acting, and I think that has been the best bit for me.
I don’t know if this is why everything has worked so well and I’m not sure I’d recommend this kind of thinking to anyone else, but I’ve always known I’d be successful in acting. I have certainly worked for it.
I think having children in general is always very helpful for acting.
Just let the wardrobe do the acting.
Comedy is acting out optimism.
I think playback singing has a lot to do with voice acting. I would suggest to all the youngsters to understand the character, situation, and the story behind the songs. That is when you can add soul to the rendition which, I think, is missing in today’s music.
I knew from a young age that I wanted to be an actor. I never even thought about other careers. The acting field is certainly not the path many Indian parents encourage their children to take, but mine were very supportive. They wanted me to have an education, but understood that this is what I wanted to do.
All I have to do is be me on stage. But acting, I have to be someone else, and walk how they would walk and blink how they would blink. I used to talk about it bad like, ‘Aw man, that person made $10 million a movie?’ But now I understand why they do. I get it now.
Much of a leader’s responsibility in creating a positive, high-performance culture is setting the right tone and acting on it consistently. That day-to-day execution – the tenor and tone – really makes the difference. One deviation – one exasperating meeting – and the CEO legitimizes bad behavior.
I always wanted to have my own restaurants even when I was acting.
Having the right people around you all the time is important. I do take the acting seriously. But this is all fun. I look at it like smoke and mirrors. I still think it’s a dream, but I ain’t pinching myself yet.
When I was in my teens, I thought, ‘Would I like to try and work hard at being an actor, or do I want to work hard at doing something musical?’ Acting won out, but I do really enjoy those moments where I get to just belt something out.
When I read ‘The Water Diviner,’ I was having the same kind of visceral reaction that I would normally have acting in something. I believed that I was the only person that could tell this story the way it needed to be told. That’s the real arrogance of a director!
The hardest part when I decided to move into acting was trusting I’d made the right decision.
I’m too busy acting like I’m not Naive. I’ve seen it all, I was here first.
