My first acting class was taught by a little known playwright, David Mamet, who then cast me in my first play, opposite John Malkovich.
With While You Were Sleeping, it was so much fun and such a Cinderella story, that I didn’t want to do another romantic comedy. I wanted to do the opposite.
It is only from the people I’ve had the good fortune to meet that I am learning the lessons to guide me. Baz Luhrmann, director of ‘Moulin Rouge,’ for example, has a childlike curiosity about the world. He doesn’t pretend to know all the answers – quite the opposite, in fact. He asks loads of questions of everyone.
A Bond girl must be a strong and independent woman, but at the same time charming and sensual. Those opposite qualities combined together make her interesting. She must be strong but at the same time feminine.
You can say the opposite of something you’ve said but you can’t do the opposite of something you’ve done.
A sister is both your mirror – and your opposite.
And, of course, they’ve always condemned dancing. You know, you might touch a member of the opposite sex. And you might get excited and you might do something natural.
I do see things that are funny on the net. I Googled myself the other day and found out that I was worth $250m, and that I was the highest-paid guy in show business! I wish so hard it was true. It is, of course, the complete opposite. I’m neither rich nor do I make a lot of money.
I was eating lots of vegetables and fruit every day during my pregnancy – my baby needed the best of the best, so it was the opposite of overeating. I had this being inside of me, and I was responsible for everything he got.
I thought we had opposite visions of electronic music. Tangerine Dream and Kraftwerk had a very robotic, mechanical approach. I had a more impressionist vision – a Ravel/Debussy approach.
Donald had reached its further edge, and could hear the rush of the stream from the deep obscurity of the abyss below, when there rose from the opposite side a strain of the most delightful music he had ever heard.
Well, in some ways I had sort of the opposite experience of other people that are sort of dreaming of being in a rock band. I was dreaming of like corporate lunches and just like, and I’m not really joking. Like the whole idea to me was really appealing.
People always tell me I’m the complete opposite of Chief Keef and act like I’m supposed to stop him from making his music. But I like Chief Keef, so it’s always super awkward. I just make music I like.
I cover my shyness by being exactly the opposite. You know, really loud and very Italian. I am an extremely insecure and fragile person, and only the people that really know me know that. But I push myself.
Magic is crazy. He is that crazy wild guy on the basketball court that is very intense and very serious. He is the guy who lives and eats and breathes basketball. Magic is a guy who would stand for nothing but winning and really prepared himself as well as he prepared his team. Earvin is the complete opposite.
We began intercepting Japanese radio transmissions, which indicated the two forces were very close to each other. We found out later that we were moving in opposite directions and passed each other by 32 miles.
I actually completely suck at being a bioethicist. What I do is history of medicine and patient advocacy. Patient advocacy is actually the opposite of bioethics, because bioethicists are the people who increasingly set up and justify the systems we patient advocates have to fight.
The second I tell myself I have to do something, I’m sure to do the opposite.
When you have little girls, you’re the coolest person in the world. I know at some point that’s going to end; in their adolescence I’ll become the opposite of that, especially if I’m parked outside a high school party.
Red carpet dressing all depends on the climate. I think richer, deeper colours are more flattering on the body, but the opposite is true if you are in Cannes or St. Tropez where the light makes deep colours look heavy and unflattering.
Money’s a necessary evil, there to give you moments. It gives me things I couldn’t have – nice things – but happiness? That’s a not a question of money and fame. Quite the opposite.
It’s my first record since my son is old enough to understand and I can’t even show it to him. Yes, it’s affected me, probably in the opposite of how anyone would have thought.
I’ve made an odd discovery. Every time I talk to a savant I feel quite sure that happiness is no longer a possibility. Yet when I talk with my gardener, I’m convinced of the opposite.
Contemplation is an alternative consciousness that refuses to identify with or feed what are only passing shows. It is the absolute opposite of addiction, consumerism or any egoic consciousness.
We have to wonder whether digital technology, rather than making it easier to communicate, is actually doing the opposite. We now sit alone at a keyboard, firing off zeros and ones into the ether. Offices are silent.
Although I’m perceived as very optimistic and upbeat, it comes out of being the opposite of that – feeling isolated or lonely, looking for meaning and the kinds of things that ease that suffering in life, and finding them in large-scale social interaction, like theater and games.
Whatever the opposite of regret is best describes how I’ve always felt about that decision – it opened me up to a million creative opportunities I needed to experience away from the bull and distorting mirrors that fame engenders.
It is not true that good can only follow from good and evil only from evil, but that often the opposite is true.
Although I’d always wanted children, it was such an opposite thing to being a singer.
I’d like to think, if I was ever in a fight, I’d win, although I’d probably run in the opposite direction.
I get nostalgic for British negativity. There is an inherent hope and positive drive to New Yorkers. When you go back to Britain, everybody is just running everything down. It’s like whatever the opposite of a hug is.
This experience actually means the very opposite: the largest military power was unable to stop such a sensitive attack and will be unable to rule out such a possibility in the future. Precisely this is the background to the United States’ military interventions.
I do think that humanitarians and journalists alike have focused on all the things that go wrong, and that they sometimes leave the perception in the public that the war on poverty has been lost. That Africa is just a bottomless pit of despair. When, in fact, really the opposite is true on both fronts.
The research side of academic life is often viewed from the outside as a solo and, at times, lonely activity. In fact, it is quite the opposite: a communal activity in significant part where interaction and interchange generate ideas and critiques of them.
The old saying, ‘An army marches on its stomach’ has never been more true than in film and television. If it’s good, cheerful, and exciting and full of great yummy things, then everyone does really well. If it’s the opposite, it’s very disappointing.
I haven’t deliberately set out to play the blonde bombshell in my movies. In fact, it’s probably been quite the opposite. After the success of The Mask, I wasn’t offered all that many blonde bombshell parts, to be honest. I think people believed from the beginning that I could actually walk and talk at the same time.
My family was entirely political, all the time, on the left. The opposite of that is not to be political on the right. It’s trying not to be – politics is not everything. There’s life other than politics. Politics intrudes.
I just feel abandoned. And I feel, I don’t feel represented by the Republican Party. I have always had to defend the social side of the Republican Party by saying that it’s not the majority, that it’s not their focus, when everything suggests just the opposite.
Everybody who labels themselves a ‘nerd’ isn’t some giant person locked in a cubbyhole who’s never seen the opposite sex. Especially with the way the Internet is now, I think that definition is getting a little more diffuse.
Our culture is intent on taking the lines out of people’s faces – surgically, with costly creams, and with fear and trembling – when, in fact, the opposite should be the case. As artists know, if there is anything behind a face, that face improves with age.
Yet the reality is that I’m a stage actor from the Midwest – probably the opposite of a shark agent.
My whole career is based on taking a left turn after each film and doing the opposite of what I’ve just done.
I wouldn’t tell Jill how I felt. I behaved in such a way that was opposite to how I felt. I must have seemed strong to her. I didn’t want to bring her down.
With acting, you wanna see if you can get into trouble without knowing how you’re gonna get out of it. It’s like the exact opposite of war, where you need an exit strategy. When you’re acting, you should get all the way into trouble with no exit strategy, and have the cameras rolling.
I’ve found that if I tell somebody ‘Eat this and don’t do that,’ it’s not only not helpful, it’s counterproductive because even more than being healthy, we want to feel free and in control, and as soon as somebody tells us to do something, there’s a tendency to do just the opposite.
True urgent leadership doesn’t drain people. It does the opposite. It energizes them. It makes them feel excited.
