I was lucky enough, when I was younger, to have the chance to do as much as possible, and I found what I wanted to do. I did swimming, gymnastics, kickboxing and the one that took off more than the others was acting.
I love the interplay between words and pictures. I love the fact that in comics, your pictures are acting like words, presenting themselves to be read.
Standup led me to acting because I liked standup, and I saw people on a stage, and the closest, nearest thing to me was doing plays. It was like, that’s the same thing as standup – people are on a stage; they’re being seen and saying things – so, because of my love of standup, I moved towards acting.
In college, I went to school for acting; we had to learn phonetics just to be able to do dialects and all that stuff. I’m somebody who does better just hearing it. I’ll just imitate it, and I get it better that way. When I know too much information, I’m not great.
Acting is reacting, and it’s always easier to react when someone is doing a good job.
I can’t imagine doing anything except acting.
I went to school in the Bronx. I learned to constantly try to cover up the fact that I was gay. That facade of being somebody I’m really not just to protect myself definitely helped with acting.
My parents are very proud of my success but still worry, as I’m in a profession where there is no guarantee of work. They have always supported my decision to go into acting, but there have been tough times work-wise.
You put a car on the road which may be driving by the letter of the law, but compared to the surrounding road users, it’s acting very conservatively. This can lead to situations where the autonomous car is a bit of a fish out of water.
Life’s like a play: it’s not the length, but the excellence of the acting that matters.
Acting, for me, is giving to your co-actors.
Cheryl’s artistically inclined. She draws and sketches, but I don’t know about acting.
I fled my home town and did odd jobs, including things like re-designing old furniture, before I became an actor. Having said that, I don’t think the story of my life is in any way remarkable. What is remarkable is how acting opportunities have come my way.
In the beginning, when you’re acting in amateur theater and off-Broadway, it was unheard of that anyone else would get your costume. And it was important to get a good costume. You put time into that.
It never occurs to me that acting with a superstar is something to worry about. I figure the bigger the better because more will be demanded of me.
There is a guilty pleasure in being rude and knowing that it’s acting rather than you. But you get the same release as if you were being rude in life.
Acting is not that far from mental disease: An actor works on splitting his character into others. It is like a kind of schizophrenia.
I hate people saying anything stupid. I don’t really suffer fools very well at all. When people are acting like idiots, not that I’m not guilty of doing the odd idiotic thing myself from time to time, but when people say stupid things, it stresses me out.
What is a struggle is that acting isn’t a place where you go to work and you do that thing. There aren’t set boundaries, like an office, where you go and work. For me, the work is always on my mind.
Stylized acting and direction is to realistic acting and direction as poetry is to prose.
What I feel is great acting might be rubbish for another filmmaker. There is no right or wrong way to do it. It all boils down to the trust between an actor and a director.
For me, acting is not a job. It is something I love. I don’t do these things for awards or rewards. I do them because I love challenges.
When I went home from Juilliard, I couldn’t find acting work.
Acting is very personal. I don’t want to be like anybody else. There are positions I would like to be in – like Meryl Streep’s, for instance.
I knew acting was what I wanted to do. I don’t know if I was brilliant at it, but when I was doing school plays, I loved it so much I didn’t want it to end. I feel like I’m exactly the same as when I was doing plays at school, to be honest.
Maybe I’m a glutton for punishment, but I enjoy anything where you get to flex your acting muscles, you get to really go for it.
With film, you have very limited tools to convey subjectivity – voiceover, the camera’s point of view, good acting – but even the very best actor in the world is crude by comparison with what you can do in a written paragraph.
My first acting job happened by accident when I was really young. I was in fifth grade and my teacher saw an ad in the paper and took me to the audition after school and I got the part.
Every acting gig isn’t the same, every writing job isn’t the same, every live performance isn’t the same – the challenge is the level of difficulty or ease, and that may vary.
I am able to do social service only because of the name I gained from acting.
Being on stage is a seductive lifestyle. My advice to aspiring actors is think twice. People sometimes go into acting for the wrong reasons – as a shortcut to fame and fortune. If these goals are not attained, they feel a bitter disappointment.
Acting never was about the money for me… Maybe in 10 years, I’ll be able to appreciate the fact that I am financially stable and independent and I don’t have to make bad choices. I can be very picky.
I didn’t start acting until I was in college, which was in the 70’s.
Craft comes into acting later rather than sooner. I was somebody who had to learn through a process – a natural actor doesn’t need to.
When you’re young, working in a warehouse or selling hot dogs, you look at work – at acting – as something precious. It gets you out of the stink.
Acting is reacting. That’s when acting is great – when you say something, somebody said something, they make a face, they pose, they use something physical, then you react to that, then they react to you.
I always feel that art in general and acting in particular should make the audience a little uncomfortable, to slap them and wake them up.
Singing is a way of releasing an emotion that you sometimes can’t portray when you’re acting. And music moves your soul, so music is the source of the most intense emotions you can feel. When you hear a song and you’re acting it’s incredible. But when you’re singing a song and you’re acting it’s even more incredible.
When ’36 Chowringhee Lane’ was released in 1981, I was a student of the Film and Television Institute of Tamil Nadu. Everyone who had seen the film was very impressed with its flawless direction and acting. But we, cinematography students, were stunned by the visual style, which was truly international.
Actors may not realize the extent of their own power. Acting is creation. It’s them bringing their own stuff, letting it marinate in their soul, in their creative engine.
Writing, of course, is writing, acting comes from the theater, and cinematography comes from photography. Editing is unique to film. You can see something from different points of view almost simultaneously, and it creates a new experience.
Acting is the most minor of gifts. After all, Shirley Temple could do it when she was four.
I have a girl crush on Olivia Munn so much, especially on ‘Newsroom.’ And Cara Delevingne, but who doesn’t love her face? Viola Davis is my acting crush.
It’s fun to look at people that are so good at acting that aren’t actors, like David Bowie creating a mystique about rock n’ roll. I’ve listened to ‘Ziggy Stardust’ as much as any rock n’ roll fan – I don’t really know what it’s about, but it sure is fun to think about David Bowie as this mad creation.
With acting, you have to just tell the truth in each moment.
I think personal growth has much to do with acting ability.
For acting, classes are a necessity, but for modeling it’s really just knowing who you are and knowing how to sell yourself.
I went from being totally unknown and never acting professionally to being in a major movie and being very famous. It all happened so quickly, I didn’t have any time to work things out. It’s been pretty scary at times.
When moms and dads put their kids in acting class, good luck. Because you’re just filling them with stuff they don’t need yet.
Some people said my acting was a cross between Euell Gibbons, Rodney Allen Rippy and Sheena, Queen of the Jungle.
I always felt like I needed to act. Not that I wanted to act, but I needed to. And I still feel that same way. There’s an expression that I get to have in acting that I can’t consciously express in my life. It has always defined me and it always will.
Acting is a way of living out one’s insanity.
I hope to make acting my career for the rest of my life, if I can.
I graduated from school for graphic design, and I started to get into acting class just to get over severe fright. I was an extremely shy person. I could barely say hello to anybody.
The first thing you have to get used to in any kind of acting is the ability to make a fool of yourself. If you haven’t learnt how to make a fool of yourself, you shouldn’t be on the boards. That’s absolutely what it’s all about.
I think I’m an actor because I have very strong imagination and empathy. I never studied acting, but those two qualities are exactly the qualities that make for an activist.
