Top 70 Joe Morton Quotes

I think it might be interesting to give an Emmy to an outstanding background performance in either a comedy or drama series.

Hollywood, it seems, recognizes black film and black filmmakers, but like a distant lover, never close enough or long enough to forge a meaningful relationship.

It’s a very different thing when you’re creating the world as opposed to when you’re just part of the world. I love the detail of it, the problem-solving of it, and I love working with actors.

I want to put something on the screen that audiences have never seen black actors do before, roles that will widen views of who African-Americans are.

Being back on stage in New York, off-Broadway – I mean, that’s an actor’s dream.

I’ve played good guys for most of my career, and when I came out to California, I thought, ‘I really would like to find some wonderfully intelligent bad guy to play.’

When I first saw Dick Gregory on television, growing up in Queens, it was startling and amazing, because nobody else was doing what he was doing.

I don’t think you can play a villain with a negative point of view.

With my background, I came out of the theater.

When I was growing up, all these superheroes were white. On some level, you put that out of your mind… but as you get older, you realize it’s a very one-sided affair. So I’m very glad to see that these movies are becoming more diversified.

I think every villain basically thinks that he or she is doing something to make his world, or the world in general, a better place.

My father was in the military; he was a captain. His service was to quote-unquote integrate the Armed Forces overseas.

I think people believe that I give an aura of someone who has both feet on the ground.

It’s important to me to play men who use their brains, not just brawn.

Unfortunately, most actors want to play off their own personal mystique and good looks and whatever, but that will only carry you but so far.

I think, very often, we’re addicted to procedurals, those good guy/bad guy shows, and the ‘problem’ with procedurals is they all follow the same formula: The bad guy does his thing, the good guy goes after him, and in most cases, the good guy figures out who did it and catches him.

I think that’s what good writing is all about. You go into a genre to talk about other things. Tolkein created a whole world to talk about the world he lived in.

I think many villains have the burden of not being very human.

I think the thing is with a movie that has this much science fiction in it; you need characters who are more science fact, if you know what I mean, than they are human.

When it comes to certain portions of our history, we’ve just forgotten it all.

I think it talks about the fact that there are black people in the world who have tremendous amount of talents and have no channel through which they can those talents.

You don’t have the opportunity to win an Emmy unless you’re given the opportunity to play certain kinds of roles.

I don’t watch a lot of television, which sounds strange for someone who works in TV.

‘Black film,’ unless it’s lucky enough or creative enough, or timely enough to build a life of its own, hangs subjacent to ‘white film’ on Hollywood’s financial score board… aided and abetted by the supposition that so-called black film has no foreign market.

In the 1980s, there was no category to stick me in. ‘He sounds too smart’ is what I was hearing. I realized that I had to become a member of the school of what I call ‘ugly acting.’ Which meant I wanted to do what Dustin Hoffman did very successfully: to play character roles, but lead character roles.

‘Paycheck,’ I thought, was a really, really good idea. I never got an opportunity, unfortunately, to read the novel, but I loved the idea of how to deal with intellectual properties. I just don’t know that we necessarily got to the heart of that particular idea. I think it became more of a chase movie than anything else.

I know who Dick Gregory is; I knew what his accomplishments are. I certainly knew him as a comedian and an activist.

When you give your children certain life lessons, and they come and ask you for additional advice, you say to yourself, ‘I’ve done my job,’ and you’ll continue to do your job.

I think theater is the strongest place to find what’s missing in entertainment. Unfortunately, it pays the least.

I actually went to the university as a psychology major, and at orientation, they took us around the campus and took us to the theater for a skit. At the end of the skit, I literally could not get up out of my seat.

You make up your mind what part you want to read for and why. It’s kept me focused – on what’s important, what I want, and what I don’t.

In most science-fiction pictures, the black guy is either an engineer or a radio operator, and he is the first guy killed – gone from the movie.

I came into the industry at a time when there weren’t a lot of choices to what you could do.

Everyone does what they believe they need to do in order to survive in this business, ‘survive’ being the operative word.

My father was in the service. His job was to integrate the Armed Forces overseas. So that meant we showed up at military bases in Okinawa or Germany, racially unannounced. That made me, in that particular society if you will, the outsider.

I think it’s true for all of us, if you find yourself doing really well at something, then the pressure is on you to try to improve.

Race prejudice has nothing to do with color. It has to do with being the stranger.

Most of my career I purposely spent doing good guys.

The more you know about the world, the more resources you have in terms of things that can inform your character or the circumstances that surround your character.

When I started off many years ago, I made a determination that there were certain roles I didn’t want to play.

You want to be challenged, so you feel like you want to get up and wrestle with the character or enjoy the character – especially with a TV show, because you know you could be doing it for a long time, so you want to make sure it’s something you really enjoy.

I would love to play the villain, but again, it’s sort of what happens in this industry.

Basically, the actor’s job is to pay attention to the script.

One, I had never worked with John Woo before and I wanted to see what that was like, and two, Ben Affleck is a friend, so it would be fun to work with him again.

I make it a habit of never trying to judge what an audience might think, only because all points of view are too close, because we’re doing it every day, I think that the actor’s point of view is sometimes too close to what the material actually is.

Part of the decision I made was to move very fluidly from one medium to the other, and so it has stayed as part of who I am. I don’t know if I have a preference.

I love doing movies but I loved doing theatre just as much.

We’ve all grown up with ‘Ozzie and Harriet,’ ‘Father Knows Best,’ ‘Eight Is Enough.’ White families have always represented the universal family.

One of the beauties of working in Shondaland is that they make an effort to get to know who you are, so they’re not giving you something that’s going to be so far out of your comfort zone.

When I started, black people were either victims or they were the perpetrators; they were the boogie men who jumped out of the bushes and did terrible things to you.

There’s nothing better than an educated actor – not only educated in his craft but educated in the world.

I think the greatest lesson that power has to teach us is, once you’ve had it, once you are a part of it, you’re never free.

Republicans in the South… are trying to find ways, not so much to block black and brown people from voting, but to block black and brown people from getting people they want elected, which is a far more subtle thing to do.

I don’t know of any actor in any television show that I have ever seen who’s given monologue after monologue in a television series.

If there’s no craft there, then once the looks go, there goes your career.

Actors are very often people who are placed in a position where they think they have to be grateful for the job and have no control over what they play and how they play it. I was not taught that way. I completely disagree with that. I think that you have more control than you think.

I was maybe one of two black kids in the drama department. It was, ‘Well, you can’t play this role because that guy has a white girlfriend or a white cousin or whatever.’

If you can keep a character fresh and alive for, let’s say, six months, working eight nights a week, then you can do anything. You have honed your technique and your skills to such a degree by that point that you are ready to take on all kinds of challenges.

If you want someone who is sort of still, has a bit of an edge, is older, you get Morgan Freeman. If you want someone who can carry a gun and still play a father, you get Danny Glover. My category is ‘that guy who happens to be black.’

If we’re still talking about the same thing 40 or 50 years later, then that means we’re not doing anything about it.

When we were bringing ‘Raisin’ onto Broadway, our first stop was at Arena in D.C. Several things struck me about being in D.C.: One was the enormous poverty around the capital at that time – it was 1973, ’74 – and I was stunned by people literally living in poverty, with holes in their houses and other things.