We’ve sourced some of the most interesting and thought-provoking Acting Quotes from Chris Evans, Michael Caine, Amandla Stenberg, Robert Half, Bette Davis. Each of the following quotes is overflowing with creativity, and knowledge.
I love acting. It’s my playground, it let’s me explore. But my happiness in this world – my level of peace – is never going to be dictated by acting.
My most useful acting tip came from my pal John Wayne. Talk low, talk slow, and don’t say too much.
I love all kinds of art. I mean, I love sketching and acting and music.
Acting on a good idea is better than just having a good idea.
Without wonder and insight, acting is just a trade. With it, it becomes creation.
If you want to be a screenwriter, take an acting class to get a sense of what you’re asking actors to do. Learning other skills will help you communicate with people and respect what they do.
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.
Ultimately, I want to be a good person and spread happiness through my acting. If I don’t forget to be appreciative and thankful, then that would be the most important thing that I’ll ever achieve.
I think good acting results when working together in a comfortable environment.
I came to L.A. with confidence in my craft, and I was very offended when I didn’t get a part. It took me awhile to understand that it is not always about your acting.
Acting is the most difficult job in the world.
I didn’t start acting until I was in college, which was in the 70’s.
It’s got to do with putting yourself in other people’s shoes and seeing how far you can come to truly understand them. I like the empathy that comes from acting.
In terms of my actual acting, I don’t really like to to copy anyone or replicate anything that I’ve seen.
With acting, I started very young, and I’d performed for a lot of children in boarding schools, late at night after the dormitory lights were out. I’d have a flashlight, and I’d be Count Dracula, or Shakespeare, or Yogi Bear, and leap from bunk to bunk. I loved the laughter; I liked the way it made people feel.
What I like about acting is that you can be a different person every day.
I’ve always done method acting. I’m a method actor, and I’ve done that for years. I never did acting and decided to take it seriously because all the parts people want me to do were playing the pretty role. If I want to play someone pretty, I’ll play myself.
Although I started off as a child artist, I left acting in between, as I felt that I was missing the fun of school days. But a little later, I became keen on acting again and started going for auditions.
I guess I was a child actor. Acting was one of the things I did alongside going to school: I’d be playing guitar, I’d be playing soccer, and I would be acting in movies.
It’s true; I have a skill and it’s… it has not related to acting, it’s not related to auditions, it’s not related to studios, not related to public whim. It’s whether I’m funny or not and whether I can entertain people.
It’s fine to have talent, but talent is the last of it. In an acting career, as in an acting performance, you’ve got to have vitality. The secret of successful acting is identical with a woman’s beauty secret: joy in living.
Acting is something I always wanted to try after wrestling, and I felt like this was a perfect fit.
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.
I just love acting.
Acting is the most personal of our crafts. The make-up of a human being – his physical, mental and emotional habits – influence his acting to a much greater extent than commonly recognized.
I remember being in college knowing I didn’t want to go anymore. I wanted to try and become an actor. There is a something in me, with a risk of sounding cliche, that I just had to do it. I knew from an early age that acting was my path.
It was a mistake. I was wrong, but I discovered this many years later. I was acting on the basis of this mandate given me by the most important leaders of the world: President Bush’s father, prime minister of France, President Mitterand, the Chinese, everybody.
I was one of those kids who thought I could be the president of England when I grew up if I wanted to. Then I started acting and realized life is hard, and people are mean. And there’s no president of England, and I’m not British.
I have a long way to go as far as my acting career is concerned. Lots of milestones are to be achieved and dreams to be fulfilled. I would someday want to do playback singing, too, as I am a very passionate singer.
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 reacting, and it’s always easier to react when someone is doing a good job.
Acting is acting at the end of the day. How does it matter if it is in films or on TV?
Acting is a business and a political act and a craft, but I also feel like it’s a service – specifically, for a military audience.
When I’m onstage, I’m acting.
Acting is a passion, but I have been taking time off to direct once in a while because it helps me reinvent myself.
I’ve always wanted to play a spy, because it is the ultimate acting exercise. You are never what you seem.
I suddenly think the job of acting is a difficult one. It’s not as flip, irrelevant and shallow a calling as I thought it was in the Eighties.
I always thought my alternative life, if I wasn’t acting, would be to become a midwife. I love women. I want to help them exist.
I do tend to like movies that challenge me professionally. That’s mostly on a smaller scale, when you have one or two or five actors, and it’s all about the acting and not the camera.
I’m not a Method actor. I don’t believe acting should be psychodrama. I look within myself and see what I can find to play the role with. If I’m playing a blind man, I don’t go around blindfolded for days. A lot of good actors would, but I don’t go in for that very much. I like to just make it up as I go along.
The good thing about acting is that it always keeps you on your toes… It’s not like any other job where you can go in and do the same thing as yesterday.
Transparency is our hallmark, and government is acting on the roadmap of economic revolution.
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 started acting when I was 10, doing musical theater. I was a brunette at that time. I was always cast in all the exotic parts.
I left school and couldn’t find acting work, so I started going to clubs where you could do stand-up. I’ve always improvised, and stand-up was this great release. All of a sudden, it was just me and the audience.
At the end of the day, stand-up comedy is like acting when the audience are the other characters that I’m acting with.
Acting is my passion, and Chelsea FC is my hobby.
I played baseball in college, and then I went to Russia to study acting and played some pro ball over there.
Acting gives you freedom to express your thoughts.
I became disillusioned with dance when I was 16 and started focusing on acting.
Leadership is the other side of the coin of loneliness, and he who is a leader must always act alone. And acting alone, accept everything alone.
Acting is not rocket science, but it is an art form. What you are doing is illuminating humanity. Or not.
I’m not acting, but I am acting.
In ‘Vagabond,’ I’m acting like a gangster; it’s very tough. I have to use my body for action scenes, and there is nothing gentlemanly about this character at all.
I think, probably, the place that I feel I most belong is a movie set. It doesn’t matter where it is in the world or who I’m making the movie with; that’s the closest thing that I’ve got to a sense of placement. So I guess acting was a way of finding a home, if that makes sense.
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.
I’ve always remembered something Sanford Meisner, my acting teacher, told us. When you create a character, it’s like making a chair, except instead of making someting out of wood, you make it out of yourself. That’s the actor’s craft – using yourself to create a character.
I acted all the way up until Princeton. It was just one of my favorite extracurricular activities. Then I got to Princeton and had a really conservative vibe. All my friends were planning on law school, med school, or Wall Street, and suddenly acting seem like a really risky proposition.
Acting’s boring.
It stands to the everlasting credit of science that by acting on the human mind it has overcome man’s insecurity before himself and before nature.
A woman in show business isn’t honest with herself… so how can she be honest with another woman? We are, all of us, acting every minute of the day and night.
I never really thought about acting when I was little; I was just getting a haircut at a salon when I was 10, and a woman approached my mom about putting me forward for an audition!
I’m confident about my stint with politics. But I won’t leave acting, one, because it brings me my daily bread, and second, I realized that whatever little extra recognition I have today, it’s thanks to my acting career.
I make video art pieces, take photographs, and dabble in acting ever since my screen test for ‘Memoirs of a Geisha’ with Steven Spielberg. But music is my first love and always will be my priority.
I remember that Pu La had come for one of my premieres and I was patiently waiting to hear his verdict of my acting, but when he came out of the theatre during interval, all he asked me was about my father and his well being, such was their friendship.
I did grow up in Los Angeles. I actually didn’t start acting until I was sixteen, so I was very removed from the Hollywood scene. I had always been in my school plays, but my mom and dad wanted to keep me out of the business until I was old enough to know who I was and not let anyone change me.
Now I know Hindi, and I can read and write Hindi, but the problem is that I can’t improvise when I am acting because I think in English, so I have to translate my thinking from English to Hindi, and therefore, I speak slowly.
When I’m out there, it’s not even me who is doing the acting and the wrestling and the moving. It is something that I feel like I see channels more than anything else. So, for me, I tune into the right frequency. I get turned on and we’re ready for take off.
There is nothing that living things do that cannot be understood from the point of view that they are made of atoms acting according to the laws of physics.
Acting with creatures that aren’t there is kind like acting with an actor who refuses to come out of his trailer. You still have to go on and do the scene.
I love the idea of metamorphosing and changing, the legalized insanity of acting.
Some people go to acting classes to learn. I just kind of went for the dates.
I like Shakespeare, but it’s not my bread and butter. It’s not what fires me up about acting at all.A lot of the ingenue parts leave a lot to be desired, in my opinion.
I don’t want to discredit people’s individuality, but I think people are pretty much the same. People are very similar. If you have a good enough imagination then you can feel things that you personally have never done before. That’s acting.
If acting doesn’t work out, I plan to do food photography and just eat my way through the entire world. I’m a big foodie, and if I could make some career out of it, that would be fantastic.
I went to UGA for a quarter. One quarter of my extended university life. I enjoyed it. UGA was a blast. I crashed all the frat parties, dressing like a frat boy, acting like I was one of them. I had too much fun. So I had a good time for the quarter that I was a Bulldog. Go Bulldogs!
When I was in my freshman year at college I took some acting classes and found that I fell in love with it again.
The best advice my dad ever gave me is that acting is believing. Acting is not acting. It isn’t putting on a face and dancing around in a mask. It’s believing that you are that character and playing him as if it were a normal day in the life of that character.
I went to school for singing, middle school at LaGuardia High School. Followed by Berkeley College of Music and afterwards I went to acting school at the Neighborhood Playhouse for Theater.
Nobody is more truthful when he’s acting than De Niro.
Acting is happy agony.
No one is truly free, they are a slave to wealth, fortune, the law, or other people restraining them from acting according to their will.
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.
My mom was a soap opera queen in Mexico and Latin America. I started acting because of her.
Being an actress isn’t as fun as it may seem. If I don’t love something, I stop doing it. I don’t love acting anymore, so I’ve stopped doing it.
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.
Acting is like lying. The art of lying well. I’m paid to tell elaborate lies.
Everyone forgets comedians are actors. There’s no question about it. A Robin Williams cannot say the same line every night for 40 weeks and make it sound fresh unless he’s doing an acting job.
I was shy and a hard worker, so acting was a way to focus whatever nervous energy I was experiencing onto a goal.
Be it a cameo, a character role or a lead role, I am happy that people are finally recognising my acting calibre and are casting me in their films.
Frustration is a sign I am acting independently. The more you try your own way, the tighter the doors will stay closed.
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.
I probably prefer comedy. Why? I’m not sure. I feel like the energy of a comedy is a better fit for me. I try to be a happy guy! It seems that most of my life has the energy more for a comedy than for drama. I’m grateful to do both, but I would have to lean towards the comedy side of acting.
With physical prep work, you know if you go to the gym, you will get size. There’s no chance it won’t happen. The emotional prep work is a variable. You could step onto the set one day and have a disconnect with your thoughts and feelings and have a rough day acting because you can’t quite tap into what you need.
I love acting, but I have two little kids, and it’s 14 hours a day out of the house. You don’t get that time back.
Yeah, I think that a play is a huge commitment, and I think that what it requires of you is a lot, so it really makes you dig in and find things, and it just makes you sharp, ’cause it’s live. Really, to me, it separates the men from the boys. I always say it’s like the frontlines of acting, when you’re on stage.
From a young age, I had done a lot of theater and musical theater. I wasn’t really sure what I wanted to do with my life, but every time I was away from acting, I just felt very incomplete and a little stir crazy.
Acting deals with very delicate emotions. It is not putting up a mask. Each time an actor acts he does not hide; he exposes himself.
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.
Whether it be in acting, music, or even in dancing, I only want to do things that I truly connect to, and with my music, it’s everything that I am.
I love acting classes. I think they’re great. It’s like working out in the gym. It’s a great place to figure out everything that’s working and what isn’t working.
I’ve been acting since I was 5 years old, from primary school to secondary school, did training at drama school, which was the big thing for me because they trained me, put me out into the industry.
My life has been very much a roller coaster ride. Not just the boxing part, not just the acting part, just my childhood, what I was into at a young age and the things I was exposed to, it’s just very abnormal.
When I started studying acting in New York, I didn’t plan to be an action hero. I just wanted to learn acting because I felt it was something I needed to try to do for myself, to express something, my inner pain, or something I couldn’t get out.
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.
The hardest part of acting is not being guaranteed work. Every job could be your last.
To choose ways of not acting was ever the concern and scruple of my life.
I love being an idiot, and acting lets you be an idiot.
Hypocrisy is not a way of getting back to the moral high ground. Pretending you’re moral, saying you’re moral is not the same as acting morally.
It was the most fun I’ve ever had on a movie. It was one of the happiest times in my life. I was living in New York, and I really enjoyed acting at the time. Also, it’s funny because that was also the time when I went downhill.
I would not want compliments that ‘I can do different roles’. I want compliments that whatever I did, I did nicely. That’s how I see acting.
Ideally, that’s what you’ve got in an acting career is an equal number of dramas and comedies and an equal number of small films and big films.
I had always been feeling uncomfortable in my mind about giving advice to others and not acting upon it myself.
Acting is a plum gig, and then animation is an even more plum gig.
I don’t care if someone is new to acting or experienced in acting: you always learn something from them. It’s just like people in life – whether they’re young or middle-aged or old, you always learn something from someone.
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 just a middle-class farm boy from Dodge City, Kansas. And I always thought that acting was art, writing was art, music was art, painting was art, and I’ve tried to keep that cultural vibe to my life.
When you start acting as a child, you grow up ahead of your movies.
If you want to surf, move to Hawaii. If you like to shop, move to New York. If you like acting and Hollywood, move to California. But if you like college football, move to Texas.
For me, comedy is constantly presented as this fake casualness, like a guy just walked on stage going, ‘This crazy thing happened to me the other day.’ And he’s in front of 3000 people, and he’s acting like an everyman, and he’s getting paid so much money.
What I enjoy most is travelling to different places and meeting new people. For me, it’s all about life experiences, and I’m very grateful that acting allows me so many interesting and fulfilling ones.
Whites would accuse you of causing trouble when all you were doing was acting like a normal human being instead of cringing.
I get burned out on standup. But I like acting. I do like it. But sometimes you just feel like a monkey. You just feel like a complete tool. But I like it. I do like it. Stand-up is just more free. A lot more freedom because you just do what you want to do.
At some point in time, you definitely have to go drama. Not to say that you’re going drama just because everybody else does it. You do it to challenge yourself. You do it because, naturally, in the profession of acting, you want to show growth. You want to say that you take the craft seriously.
I remember when the results of the All India Engineering exams came out. I ranked 7th. I even got a scholarship. But it was during the sixth semester of my engineering course that I decided to call it quits and pursue acting seriously.
When you’re acting, it should be the most important thing that’s going on. But when you’re not, leave it alone.
I’d always enjoyed acting at high school, and I was all lined up to do an honours degree course in biology at a Canadian university, and at the eleventh hour the drama teacher I had said, ‘You know, you’ll get a lot more girls if you go into acting,’ and that kinda sold it.
Pay in the acting world hasn’t kept up with inflation.
I think good acting results when working together in a comfortable environment.
With modeling, you pose. You want to look your best all the time. With acting, you have to be aware of the camera, but the more you show your imperfections, the better you’re going to be.
The nature of the human mind is such that unless it is stimulated by images of things acting upon it from without, all remembrance of them passes easily away.
When it comes to social consequences, they’ve got all different people acting in different ways, very difficult to even have a proper criterion of success. So, it’s a difficult task.
No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.
But acting is very much a profession that is you’re hot one moment and not the next – and that is totally cool. I think that’s what I find most fascinating and most exciting about it – is that it can be gone in a puff of smoke.
Obviously, modeling and acting are very different. With acting, there’s just so much more to explore on an intellectual, emotional, and physical level, especially with ‘Ma.’
Acting is more creative and liberating than production.
Acting is a matter of giving away secrets.
Making films has never just been a job to me; it is my life. I have some interests outside of acting – I sing and I’ve written books, for instance – but acting is what keeps me going: it’s what I do; it gives life purpose.
The advice that I was always given when asking for advice about acting was that if I could imagine myself doing anything else, anything else at all, then go do that.
I’m just starting to scratch the surface of what really makes me happy and it’s taken me a while to admit that acting like a little child and being a jerk and a punk is fun.
I think acting is something that is within you. It’s a very natural thing for me. It comes from myself, really.
When I was little, I was actually really shy. I really enjoyed doing school plays, but I found the whole thing terrifying. I cried myself to sleep once because I thought my teacher was going to give me the lead role. I never imagined acting was a viable career.
In my long and difficult and mature life, I have come to learn that the less I know about acting and the more I know about everything else, the better I’ll be at both acting and living.
I wasn’t really serious about acting – I was serious about baseball.
If all the circumstances of acting are made to easy, then there’s no grain of sand to make the pearl.
I may be 80, but I intend to keep acting until the day I die. Instead of slowing down, I’ve discovered my second wind.
In captivity, one loses every way of acting over little details which satisfy the essentials of life. Everything has to be asked for: permission to go to the toilet, permission to ask a guard something, permission to talk to another hostage – to brush your teeth, use toilet paper, everything is a negotiation.
I like talking. I like acting.
Law is downstream from culture. By the time you make a law about something, you’re reacting, not acting. I’d rather shape the culture.
To me, acting is the most logical way for people’s neuroses to manifest themselves, in this great need we all have to express ourselves.
I started out as a writer and a director. I started acting because I wanted to know how to relate to the actors. When people ask me what I do, I don’t really say that I’m an actor, because actors often wait for someone to give them roles.
Coming back to a television series puts you back in the limelight and gives you a platform for your ideas. If you’re not acting on a series, you don’t get the ability to communicate to people.
One of the things about acting is it allows you to live other people’s lives without having to pay the price.
Every now and then you get a nice Jewish kid who likes black people and they would come in, and it would be a stream of them, and have black friends and really feel the black struggle on the acting tip and it’s a reason why all of us are not dying in the movie.
T.V. acting is a great skill to have, and it’s nice to have that stability.
I had never really acted before, so I really didn’t know what I was doing. The casting director for ‘Euphoria’ set me up with an acting coach in New York, and he completely flipped my world around. The way you learn to utilize your brain and your emotions really freaked me out.
Acting is such a personal thing, which is weird because at the same time it’s not. It’s for the consumption of other people. But in terms of creative outlets and expressing yourself, it’s just the most extreme version of that that I’ve ever found. It’s like running, it’s exertion.
I am acquainted with no immaterial sensuality so delightful as good acting.
With any role, you’re extending yourself and acting out things that never happened to you.
We had nothing in hand and my father used to live on the street. The profession of acting happened to him when B.R. Chopra picked him up for a film, and my father acted just to earn money for survival.
My acting technique is to look up at God just before the camera rolls and say, ‘Give me a break.’
Modeling teaches you to be completely conscious of the camera. Acting is being totally unconscious of it.
Acting job can create a fantasy or stereotype for others. That’s why we try not to show our personal lives so much.
I know this may come as a shock to most of you, but I’ve decided to quit acting. I will not be auditioning for anything anymore, and if I get offered something like a role in a movie or a commercial or something, I will graciously turn it down. It’s been great, but its just not for me anymore.
Playing basketball is second nature to me; acting I found far more challenging.
When strangers start acting like neighbors… communities are reinvigorated.
To those acting against peace, civilization and the world order: We will oppose you.
For my first acting gig, I was a hand model for a Barbie commercial that was only going to air in Asia. And I was constantly trying to get my face in the shot.
Science is not a heartless pursuit of objective information. It is a creative human activity, its geniuses acting more as artists than as information processors.
I took a break from acting for a little bit, came back, and didn’t know how it was going to be, but I had so much fun. I really had, like, a reinvention, a renewal.
I knew at an early age I wanted to act. Acting was always easy for me. I don’t believe in predestination, but I do believe that once you get where ever it is you are going, that is where you were going to be.
I had a bonding problem when I went off and boxed for five years. I was over in Europe and Asia fighting because I wanted to do something different; I was tired of acting. But the thing is, when I was done doing that, I couldn’t get a job.
Acting happened to me. If I had pursued it, I think it would have been like someone going to a bar, desperately looking for love and not finding anyone.
Acting is an expression of imagination. No firsthand knowledge is necessary.
I directed a short series for Hulu called ‘Paloma,’ and being in an editing room, I learned a lot about acting. It gave me a new bolt of energy in terms of my interest in filmmaking because it made me realize how collaborative filmmaking can be and also that you’re not just limited to one job.
Having an interview in English is difficult for me, but acting in English is much harder. Because when I’m acting in English, if someone points out bad pronunciation or accent, I cannot focus on my emotions anymore, so it was very hard.
One day, my twin sister Sidra and I pranked Tyler Perry on the set of ‘For Better or Worse.’ I made her dress up as me and do a scene as if she were my character Angela. Tyler says, ‘Action!’ and my sister starts acting. It was horrible.
Acting is all about honesty. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.
The acting part is easy; it’s the preparing – lifting weights and getting your body in tip-top shape – that’s the hard part.
I can’t imagine doing anything except acting.
Never get caught acting.
Opera is the most complete art form. It includes drama, acting, technology (lighting), art (the sets), dance, and the epitome of the human voices. But mostly, go for the glorious music. The arts are crucial to the life of every community.
This acting is going to leave my stain. Not just my mark, because you can wipe a mark off. But a stain: it’s going to take a whole lot to get that out, and that’s how I’m going to leave my stain on this world.
Acting is what I do. It’s not what I solely define myself as.
Cheryl’s artistically inclined. She draws and sketches, but I don’t know about acting.
Acting is all about honesty. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.
Improv as an actor makes you present in the moment. You listen, you’re attentive. You’re not acting so much as reacting, which is what you’re doing in life all the time.
I think I’m really bad at voice acting.
If you do things, whether it’s acting or music or painting, do it without fear – that’s my philosophy. Because nobody can arrest you and put you in jail if you paint badly, so there’s nothing to lose.
I’m often spotted when I’m staring at something open-mouthed and I’m sure people must think I’m not acting.
Comedy is acting out optimism.
Being a 25 year old man with no money or job affected my sense of self-worth. Rejection became unbearable. Auditions weren’t just acting jobs, they were lifelines.
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’m enjoying it, but I still don’t know why I’m hooked on acting.
When I was young, my parents made me listen to old music and watch Jimmy Durante. I fell in love with the whole mystique of acting and entertainment.
Partying and having all of those pictures taken distracts from the work that I do. It’s not why I started acting. I didn’t get into acting to be written about. It kind of just happened – so I accept that it’s my life.
I just stick to my job, which is acting. Things like posters, publicity material, and promotions are entirely the film-maker’s prerogative. I don’t get into all of that.
If you’re small and can speak clearly and you’re a cute kid, that’s the craft, really. The whole child actor thing can be dangerous sometimes. Other kids were taking piano lessons; I did ballet and acting.
Acting was a lot like football. When you’re a DB and you’re one on one with a receiver, you’re going to dance. It’s go-time in front of 100,000 people and everybody watching on TV. That’s exactly how it is when a director says ‘Action!’ It’s the same adrenaline rush, the same training process. I love it.
Men acquire a particular quality by constantly acting in a particular way.
My father was a GP; my mother was a teacher and amateur actress. My father was a bit of a storyteller, but the acting influence must have been from her – yes, put it down to my mother.
Well, from an acting point of view, I bear no relation, I don’t look like Alfred Kinsey at all, but I thought somewhere in my artist’s soul, my actor’s soul, I could capture something of the spirit of the man.
Acting means living, it’s all I do and all I’m good at. If I weren’t getting paid well, I would still be acting in a small troupe somewhere.
A man who waits to believe in action before acting is anything you like, but he’s not a man of action. You must act as you breathe.
I would be an actress for the rest of my life just because it’s really relaxing. Writing is hard work, and stand-up is so stressful before you get on stage, but acting is a complete ensemble experience.
There’s a Zen to acting, by being in the moment. That’s where the power is.
If you’ve been associated and successful with a particular kind of acting for so many years, then it’s wise to continue in the same direction.
It was a sort of weird, troubled road into acting because I had been a bit naughty in school until I did my Highers, and then I was like, ‘Oh, I think I’m going to apply myself and surprise everyone.’
Acting is a mix of luck and choice. I got lucky.
I was studying to be an architect, I wasn’t plotting to join the movies. Films were just another career option. I took acting up with the same schoolgirl enthusiasm I had for examinations. Acting is a job and I take it very seriously.
Being Michael Jordan means acting the same as I always have.
I kind of fell into acting, but I have sung and trained since I was in the eighth grade.
In my early days, I used to go to many acting gurus, Asha Chandra and Roshan Taneja being two of them.
I started dancing at age three and then got involved in musical theatre and acting around age seven. I think I’ve probably known since then that I want to be a professional actor.
Justice is rather the activity of truth, than a virtue in itself. Truth tells us what is due to others, and justice renders that due. Injustice is acting a lie.
When people call me God, I say, no, I’m still an angel or saint of acting. I still have a long way to go.
It was difficult when I was very young because I was so separated from my family. When I was at school or acting in a play, I felt very much part of something, and then it would always change, and I would be by myself.
Life’s like a play: it’s not the length, but the excellence of the acting that matters.
I went to public school my whole life, graduated high school with my class. Growing up, I’d go to an audition, my friends would go to soccer practice and we’d all reconvene and hang out in our neighborhood. When I would book something, I would never tell my friends. Acting was just fun. I was a kid, I wasn’t jaded.
I wanted to emulate my parents – Mum captained India in basketball, and Dad won a bronze in hockey in 1972 Olympics. My focus has always been to achieve excellence whether in the field of tennis, in the corporate field, in the art of acting or in motivating youngsters.
Acting is everybody’s favorite second job.
I did ‘Dirty Picture’ when I was only 24 years old. From there on, I kept on acting and learning about acting.
I saw ‘Taxi Driver,’ and ‘Taxi Driver’ kind of saved my life. The scene where Robert De Niro is looking at himself in the mirror saying, ‘You talkin’ to me? You talkin’ to me? Who the hell else are you talkin’ to?’ That’s the scene that changed my life by changing my attitude about acting.
I got into acting because my teachers kept nudging me into it. The power a teacher has to influence someone is so great. I can’t think of a profession I have more respect for.
I know this may come as a shock to most of you, but I’ve decided to quit acting. I will not be auditioning for anything anymore, and if I get offered something like a role in a movie or a commercial or something, I will graciously turn it down. It’s been great, but its just not for me anymore.
For me, it’s always the script. The script which gives me the chance to do something new; that has been my prime objective ever since I started acting. There’s nothing else that excites me more than that.
I’m not giving up acting, I’m definitely not going to stop.
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.
I’m not as good a singer as I am an actor. So that’s why I – the stories I like so much is because I’ve been a story teller for a long time. I started as a singer and found out I didn’t have a very good voice. That’s the reason I went into acting.
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.
It’s impossible for me to be successful at what I love most, which is acting and making people laugh, without making sure my body is fueled in the right way.
I don’t think I’m misunderstood, but there is definitely a certain side of me that the press focuses on – my body, my hair, or who I’m dating – which has never really served me as an actor. It’s served me in the commercial world, making money as a model, but the media perception has really hindered my acting career.
I’d prefer to go under the radar and just do the acting without being famous for it.
I wanted to go to LaGuardia High School for acting, but my math grades weren’t high enough. So I didn’t get to go to a school that was geared toward the art that I was interested in because I wasn’t good enough at math.
This is as true in everyday life as it is in battle: we are given one life and the decision is ours whether to wait for circumstances to make up our mind, or whether to act, and in acting, to live.
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.
I’m not looking to be a trophy. When not acting, I spend my time studying metaphysics and quantum mechanics to keep my life as grounded as I can.
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.
Acting is a career where you keep learning with every film you do.
I see society as something dangerous, and you have to save yourself from the rules. I think acting is the way I save myself.
As an actor, acting is like playing a sport. You do this thing that’s intangible, and while it’s happening, it’s great. But then when it’s done, there’s really no tangible product. Someone else is capturing it and turning it into something tangible.
I think that acting could be a talent.
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.
I didn’t learn acting. I was still in school/college, shooting and then going back to studies.
I was an amazing bartender and a great waiter. I think, in a way, that was my acting school.
The two worst strategic mistakes to make are acting prematurely and letting an opportunity slip; to avoid this, the warrior treats each situation as if it were unique and never resorts to formulae, recipes or other people’s opinions.
Acting is usually regarded as a wholly narcissistic pursuit but there really is a hunger in me to unravel the human condition.
Stop acting as if life is a rehearsal. Live this day as if it were your last. The past is over and gone. The future is not guaranteed.
There are two main jobs in acting – the first one is to be a good actor, and the second one is to convince everyone that you’re a good actor.
It’s a funny thing. You sort of never figure it out with acting. You’re always learning.
When I was younger, acting, singing and dancing was what it was all about. That’s really what kept me in school because I was really naughty otherwise.
Acting is a very big part of what human beings do. A dog is always a dog, but we’re always changing.
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 did a play called Throne of Straw when I was 11, at the Odyssey Theatre in Los Angeles. It became really clear to me at that point that I enjoyed acting more than any other experience I was having.
When it comes to acting, you really have to create movement which in some ways is dancing. And dancing, I feel is very important to act as well. I wouldn’t put one over the other.
I did swimming, gymnastics, dance, and the acting was just a small part. I didn’t have pushy parents; it wasn’t forced upon me. They just said, ‘See if you like it. If you do, great; if you don’t, don’t worry about it.’ I was really fortunate to have that guidance and supportive parents.
Acting is a way of living out one’s insanity.
Modeling is really silent acting.
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.
You know, acting is very fascinating. But being an actress is not, because you become so concentrated on yourself.
The thing with acting is I’m at the liberty of someone who wants to book me. With music, I can do it all the time. With acting, I could, too, if I wanted to write a script and do that whole thing, but music is a constant thing. Acting, I have to audition.
The only time I commit to conspiracy theories is when something way retarded happens. Like Lee Harvey Oswald acting alone.
I remember going to acting class, so certain that no one’s ever going to know my name.
I did a lot of serious plays, and I did the Oxford Review as well, which is supposed to be funny, but I’m not sure how funny we were when we did it. Then, when I finished my course, it was only then that I decided to go to drama school and try and do acting because I was enjoying it so much and so on.
At the end of the day, stand-up comedy is like acting when the audience are the other characters that I’m acting with.
Sometimes ‘great acting’ is just showing off – chewing up scenery and dialogue and other actors – the equivalent of a theatrical sugar rush.
I am passionate about acting. ‘Girls in our family are not allowed to act’ is quite an outdated thought to have. They did it till my mother, but now no more.
Acting is standing up naked and turning around very slowly.
Certain people are like ‘Oh, here come the Feminazis!’ You end up acting 10 times nicer than you even need to be, to be the opposite of the stereotype like ‘You’re the man haters!’ We’re always bending over backwards being extra nice. And I don’t know if being nice is my legacy.
The world is full of people with different characters and temperaments. We all have a dark side, a tendency to manipulate, and aggressive desires. The most dangerous types are those who repress their desires or deny the existence of them, often acting them out in the most underhanded ways.
I was exposed to acting at a young age. I was very lucky to grow up in that environment.
To me, acting is like tennis. You’re only as good as the person you’re playing with, so if you’re playing with Michael C. Hall, what do you have to worry about?
What I find most interesting about acting is transforming myself.
Believe me, when an actress is told that her very name is synonymous with bad acting, she’s had it.
Well, I think one of the main things that you have to think about when acting in the movies is to try not to make the acting show.
I am in movies basically for the money, and frankly, I have a hard time believing those who say they act for the love of acting!
Acting is the most minor of gifts. After all, Shirley Temple could do it when she was four.
I took acting classes, and I’m always trying to improve myself. Everyone can improve, and the more you work in the industry, the better you are going to feel about it.
Acting is different from stand-up. It gives you this ability to enter into another character, to create another person.
I’ve wanted to follow my dad into acting for as long as I can remember. ‘I’ve had a very serious round of dramatic training, and I like action films that take their characters seriously, so I figure I’m making it the best of both worlds if I try to bring some serious acting to a shoot-’em-up picture.
I like reading novels because it provides insight into human behavior. I am really interested in feelings and think they are what define us as a species. When you really get it right in acting, it’s an act of empathy. You feel less distant from others, and that is really exciting.
Acting is the physical representation of a mental picture and the projection of an emotional concept.
I could describe my career in two words: who knew. I was on the path to becoming a professional baseball player, but I got injured in college. When I decided to move out to L.A. to try acting, nobody was betting on me, not even my family.
Stylized acting and direction is to realistic acting and direction as poetry is to prose.
Marriage requires a special talent, like acting. Monogamy requires genius.
Money was always on my mind when I was growing up. So I was always wondering how we were going to afford this and that. Acting seemed to be a shortcut out of the mess.
Science is not a heartless pursuit of objective information. It is a creative human activity, its geniuses acting more as artists than as information processors.
I had never thought that I would get into acting but I was very cute and pretty looking.
Gravity must be caused by an Agent acting constantly according to certain laws, but whether this Agent be material or immaterial I have left to the consideration of my readers.
I started acting because I enjoyed school plays.
It is easier to act yourself into a new way of feeling than to feel yourself into a new way of acting.
Yes, I was actually an acting teacher for a while.
But then acting is all about faking. We’re all very good at faking things that we have no competence with.
An acting assistant stage manager in a theater in Canterbury, a rep theater. A small wage but just enough to get by on, and I made props and I walked on, and I changed scenery, and I realized that I just loved it.
With ‘Avatar,’ you’re beginning to see the need for less and less actors and less of an appreciation for live acting.
The world is full of people with different characters and temperaments. We all have a dark side, a tendency to manipulate, and aggressive desires. The most dangerous types are those who repress their desires or deny the existence of them, often acting them out in the most underhanded ways.
I enjoy acting now more than I ever have. I’ve had lots of difficult times when I was younger, but that was all tied up with thwarted ambition. It’s hard being a young actor, because you don’t realise until later that it’s only ever about doing the work.
A lot of people think, ‘I’ll give acting or poetry or filmmaking a try. And if it doesn’t work out I’ll go get a law degree, do something else that’s more practical.’ For me I went the reverse way. I lived the back-up plan.
Acting was a hobby for me when I started out, or maybe it was because there weren’t a lot of examples of me when I found an interest in this art form.
When I’m on an adult set and I’m in a scene, I am myself. I’m not acting. I am playing to the camera, definitely, but I am myself.
I like and I love everything that has to do with cinema: writing, directing, editing, creating music, and even acting.
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 love all kinds of art. I mean, I love sketching and acting and music.
I want to explore a lot of things, do acting here and there.
When I started comedy, I was a big Eddie Murphy fan. I thought if you did stand-up, you were supposed to know how to act, write, and host. I thought it was all one thing. That’s why it doesn’t feel like I’m transitioning to acting: because in my stand-up, I do characters all the time.
I had a wife and children. I was mostly working in painting and decorating and then taking the occasional acting job as they came along. At that stage in your life you have to think about your priorities. It looked like I was going to have to take the building more seriously and give up acting.
When I am not acting or performing, I want to keep quiet and not to have a conversation.
When you are born and brought up in Udupi, you end up as a doctor or an engineer. Else you are thought to be a dull head. I had to complete my engineering and worked in the IT industry for a few years to get myself the financial support to pursue my dream of acting.
As God commands us men to teach your wife, to teach your children – to be the spiritual leader of your family – you’re acting as a priest. Now, unfortunately, unfortunately, in too many Christian homes, the role of the priest is assumed by the wife.
I’ve learned that for Indian people, the opportunity for us to succeed is very slim. So acting was a great tool for that. And in the process of learning about my culture, I’ve learned how to connect myself again to my ancestors.
I don’t even draw on my life experiences when I’m acting. I just try and make it feel like I’m living through that person’s skin.
My brother, Chris Massey from ‘Zoey 101’, was acting first at a young age. I just followed in my sibling’s footsteps.
My first manager, Suzanne DeWalt, saw a play I was in. She was invited by the director Joan Scheckel, who was my first real acting teacher. Joan was also good friends with my friend Susie Landau Finch, who had first encouraged me to consider acting, so that’s how I began studying.
My acting coach I’ve got here, Richard Lawson, he’s been doing good, just telling me to calm down sometimes and just be me.
My brother’s my teacher, my mentor, and we both learnt all the acting basics from our father.
I was ashamed to admit I was hipped to the idea of acting. That’s why I started in with the props.
Acting is not an important job in the scheme of things. Plumbing is.
I’m in a real minority as far as having really supportive parents in regards to the arts. They never batted an eye as far as not letting me do that stuff. That’s invaluable. I can’t believe how unabashedly supportive they were about everything, between music and acting.
I have no ambitions at all! I have none… seriously. I want to be a good father. I want to be a good husband. I want to be a good son, a good brother, a good family member. I don’t have any ambition to direct a film or write a play. I like acting.
I grew up in New York, so I fell in love with acting on a stage, not in front of a camera.
My mother enjoyed acting as well with my father, who used to direct her in plays at his regiment. My sister is an excellent singer. However, it was only me who decided to pursue acting as a career.
All the time that I’m acting with an animated character, I’m looking at a tennis ball or sticky tape or an eyeline or a man in a green suit. There’s no real environment, just this electric green that’s blaring into your brain.
At the end of drama school, I made a contract with myself: I’d try acting for five years. I was 26. I had already spent eight years working in restaurants and gas stations. So I had seen enough small businesses to understand that that’s what acting is: a small business.
It was some great times and some great moments… I’m proud to be a WWE alumni. If it wasn’t for my time there, there’s no way I’d be excelling at Fox and acting.
One of the first things I learned about acting was, the only person you compete against is yourself.
The action-movie genre is a very difficult one to get satiated in terms of your acting bits.
Acting is invigorating. But I don’t analyse it too much. It’s like a dog smelling where it’s going to do its toilet in the morning.
I will always do stand-up, even if my acting career takes off. Stand-up is my life.
After acting in a critically acclaimed film like ‘Kaaka Muttai,’ I didn’t get any offers for more than a year.
While acting in ‘W,’ my worries about the way I act settled down. I also discovered another side of myself. It was a turning point.
I was a student of Stella Adler and then later Lee Strasberg, and they were into sensory work. At its best, acting is not about words – even when the words are important.
With acting, it was really more of a general kind of experience of really just loving being in the theater.
I was acting when I was playing baseball.
To be with Derek Jacobi and Stellan Skarsgard, it’s a master class in acting every day.
The best thing about acting is that I get to lose myself in another character and actually get paid for it… It’s a great outlet. I’m not really sure who I am – it seems I change every day.
There’s nothing more boring than unintelligent actors, because all they have to talk about is themselves and acting. There have to be other things.
It’s bad writing, however naturalistic it’s written, that’s where you have to do your best acting.
An actor has to be very, very careful, as one of the most wonderful props – and actors love props – is a cigarette. There’s so much to do with it: you can bring it up to your face, play with the smoke. It’s just the greatest – ever since I was 16 and in acting school in England, I’ve been playing around with cigarettes.
I’m too busy acting like I’m not Naive. I’ve seen it all, I was here first.
I don’t think I know enough about acting to direct. You need to be a slight megalomaniac, not where you want to take over the world, but where you want to make every single decision and the buck stops with you. It’s an awful lot of stress.
With ‘Taxi Driver,’ I had this eureka moment. I realized that acting could be much more than what I had been doing. I had to build a character that wasn’t me.
To start telling people that you’re beautiful, or just feel beautiful, just start acting like you are the most beautiful woman in the world. And it really improves everything! Because your sort of psyche responds to it – like this is truthful!
Never stand still. Only stand still enough to learn, and once you stop learning in that stance, move off. Always keep yourself engaged, in theater, in whatever job you can get. If you can’t get an acting job, then go backstage. Or take tickets. But be around actors because that is where you will primarily learn.
Will Smith’s acting reaffirms my belief in the American perfection.
Because I came out as a singer, I took the time to get an acting coach.
When I am not acting, I am in depression, and then I do depression management.
I can watch a movie and go, ‘Oh, my god, that person is acting.’ If you just listen to what the other person is saying, your response will always be genuine.
I’m too busy acting like I’m not Naive. I’ve seen it all, I was here first.
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.
I love acting. It’s an interesting challenge to make something that doesn’t exist appear like it’s happening, and to do it in a real way.
I did makeup for a plus-size model a month after I officially quit acting. It was just fate. The photographer was like, ‘Have you ever thought of modeling?’ It may have been the one thing I never thought was possible for me.
There is no overacting, only untrue acting.
The better the actor I am acting with, the better my performance gets.
I’m aiming to do what I need to do for acting and nothing more. I’m bowing down to acting.
The hardest thing about ‘Mulan’ is to put yourself in that circumstance and to have the answer be organic, and not be acting.
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 would say that Emma Stone and Emma Watson are two very talented young actresses who are very intelligent and have a great sense of humor and have learned to balance what they love with their acting career, and I think that’s really a great thing.
Acting is just a way of making a living, the family is life.
Acting is half shame, half glory. Shame at exhibiting yourself, glory when you can forget yourself.
My first love is acting on stage. A sitcom is a hybrid of stage and film.
I want to continue acting as long as I can because being on the sets is a big stress buster for me. I can’t possibly think of stopping my visits to the sets because I’m old.
I’ve never thought of acting as rocket science – you put on the costume, get your hair cut, and that’s it, really.
It’s got to do with putting yourself in other people’s shoes and seeing how far you can come to truly understand them. I like the empathy that comes from acting.
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 I went home from Juilliard, I couldn’t find acting work.
I loved music, acting, and drama, but these weren’t something I pursued until I was 19.
Acting is a question of absorbing other people’s personalities and adding some of your own experience.
I actually made an effort to reject acting, to shove it out of my body, because I didn’t want my kids to have an actress as a mother-to have, like, a silly person.
When you get to live your dream, with singing and dancing and acting and playing these wonderful stories, you really have already won, and you always have to remember that.
You have to love what you do, and you have to need it like you need air. And there’s nothing else that would give me the same degree of satisfaction as acting, which is why I can’t walk away from it.
It’s important to have a fallback and other activities that keep you interested. I started acting when I was about nine or 10 years old. My father was a midtown firefighter so I always wanted to be a firefighter, but then acting came along. I have to have a plan B.
I don’t know that I had context for being trans until I moved to Rochester, New York, to pursue my dream of acting, and started going to drag shows. I had never seen a transsexual before, and I didn’t yet fully understand my own identity.
My first film was with Cuba Gooding Jr, ‘The Fighting Temptations,’ and I had a little part here and there on little shows as guest stars. And I’ve taken acting classes.
Why do we go around acting as though everything was friendship and reliability when basically everything everywhere is full of sudden hate and ugliness?
I enjoy wearing a saree more than a mini skirt and maybe that has come off as bad acting in some of my films, because I didn’t fit in there.
You know the circus performer who spins the plates in the air you know, and he’ll spin six or seven plates in the air? Acting sometimes is kind of that guy spinning all those plates in the air but in your head and in your body.
I think having children in general is always very helpful for acting.
I loved acting and wanted to be a leading man. But I decided I’d rather be a big fish in the stuntman pond than a little acting fish. I guess I must have made the right decision.
I do really like my co-stars when I’m acting. As a person, as a partner, and as something beyond that.
Thinking is easy, acting is difficult, and to put one’s thoughts into action is the most difficult thing in the world.
When you see bad acting, that’s usually what it is – they’re not listening to the other characters. It’s always hard with first-time actors to get them in that moment where they are really listening to the other characters and reacting to the other characters.
I’d love for Samantha to continue acting after our marriage. She has worked hard to achieve her stardom. Unlike me, she had no family empire to back her career in Telugu cinema.
It’s tough when take 1 is technically okay and take 2 has better acting. Out here (Hollywood) they print the first one. That’s the one where we all hit the mark on the floor and who cares about the acting.
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.
I love acting.
I love experimenting and doing new things in life, and if things fall into place, I’m ready to take up acting, too.
I always wanted to be in Bollywood and the first step towards that was by participating in school plays. I would get awards for my acting and that motivated me to get into Bollywood.
On the stage he was natural, simple, affecting, ‘Twas only when he was off, he was acting.
My mom didn’t ever think I would take to acting because I was a very shy, very reserved kind of child. But obviously, something changed!
My sights have always been on acting, on the creative process, never the lifestyle. Growing up in Northern Ireland when I did, everything was against you if you wanted to do something like that. But I was determined.
The correct strategy in heads-up poker is based on identifying and acting upon your opponent’s strengths and weaknesses.
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.
The very first show I did was ‘Fame L.A.’ Everyone had talent… it was either dancing or acting or something like that. I was a singer, so I got my first role.
I grew up around horses, but acting and riding on camera is a whole different thing.
It’s not subtle or restrained. It’s not any of the things you like to think apply to your acting.
My own dreams fortunately came true in this great state. I became Mr. Universe; I became a successful businessman. And even though some people say I still speak with a slight accent, I have reached the top of the acting profession.
When I was sixteen I started acting, and I also started to embrace my tradition and culture. I had a young medicine man interpret for me what it is to be an Indian. He really caught me at a good time because I was really vulnerable after the loss of my parents with all of the feelings of abandonment.
I moved in with a roommate who told me, ‘Stay with me until you can afford rent. Don’t give up.’ People who supported me were like, ‘If you don’t have money for food, I’ll cook you dinner. You don’t have money for acting class? Let’s get together and read lines.’
Acting is make-believe. I never believe I’m the character; I want you to believe.
I’m proud of everything I do, but I think I’m the most happy about becoming a rapper. It was my entrance into everything. That helped me get into acting.
The art of acting consists in keeping people from coughing.
When I started acting almost 50 years ago, it wasn’t about fame. It was about acting.
She was just Ma, and I didn’t grow up in some kind of acting dynasty: Orson Welles didn’t come round and give me a piggyback; Vivien Leigh never read me a bedtime story. It was just my mum and our housekeeper, whom I adored, and after that, it was boarding school.
I have only one rule in acting – trust the director and give him heart and soul.
No one is truly free, they are a slave to wealth, fortune, the law, or other people restraining them from acting according to their will.
My approach to acting is that I am totally intuitive. I read the script and I get it. If I don’t get it, I can’t do it.
I always wanted to have my own restaurants even when I was acting.
Acting is just a way of making a living, the family is life.
The political machine triumphs because it is a united minority acting against a divided majority.
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.
Logotherapy sees the human patient in all his humanness. I step up to the core of the patient’s being. And that is a being in search of meaning, a being that is transcending himself, a being capable of acting in love for others.
I don’t like acting; not in front of the camera.
The films by Mamoru Hosoda or Hayao Miyazaki show things that can’t be expressed by people. When I watch people acting, I end up analysing too much and it breaks the mood.
Earlier, I used to charge territories instead of my fees as an actor, but I realised it was better to keep the two apart. Now, I take my fees in cash, for acting, and keep the distribution thing separate.
I find acting tough, but sitting around chatting – that’s easy.
As a medical doctor and cardiac surgeon, I had the responsibility of performing open-heart surgery on President Spencer W. Kimball in 1972, when he was Acting President of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles.
I believe acting is very physical, and when you have to fight or do those kinds of things, it takes a lot of respect not to allow yourself to go off and hurt yourself or someone else.
It is the habit of every aggressor nation to claim that it is acting on the defensive.
I think acting is all about the other people. Sounds like a worthy thing to say, but it’s true.
I guess a younger me would like that I tried acting? Although I swore that I’d actually go to L.A. and try to make it in movies and I didn’t do that. I did try, though. And I found that I didn’t like it.
My mum’s father was a producer and her mother was an actress, so my mum was fully behind me going into acting.
I don’t hate myself anymore. I used to hate my work, hated that sexy image, hated those pictures of me onstage, hated that big raunchy person. Onstage, I’m acting the whole time I’m there. As soon as I get out of those songs, I’m Tina again.
I don’t think acting is something words can express. It’s just a feeling.
It’s funny – when I started acting, I didn’t know I was going to be talking about Asian-American issues so much. You know what, though? It just comes with the territory, being ethnic.
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.
I went to a school called Tring Park School for the Performing Arts. I went because initially I was very naughty, and my mom thought if I was busy, I’d be better. And I didn’t really do acting until later on in the school, with an amazing teacher. I left, went traveling, came back.
Botox should be banned for actors, as steroids are for sportsmen. Acting is all about expression; why would you want to iron out a frown?
There is nothing that living things do that cannot be understood from the point of view that they are made of atoms acting according to the laws of physics.
A lot of film acting is about being casual.
I wanted to go to drama school, but when I got the part in ‘Falling,’ I got an agent, so it seemed a good idea to work. I always did a lot of singing and dancing, so I am glad it worked out that way. I would like to study stage acting at some point, though.
There is no right in acting.
Acting is like lying. The art of lying well. I’m paid to tell elaborate lies.
I think the biggest difficulty from transitioning from professional wrestling to the acting world is generally toning down your performance.
It is easier to act yourself into a new way of feeling than to feel yourself into a new way of acting.
I’ve always been fairly confident in my acting.
Opponents of capital punishment argue that the state has no right to take a murderer’s life. Apparently, one fact that abolitionists forget or overlook is that the state is acting not only on behalf of society, but also on behalf of the murdered person and the murdered person’s family.
What makes Superman a hero is not that he has power, but that he has the wisdom and the maturity to use the power wisely. From an acting point of view, that’s how I approached the part.
That was the fun of acting, being a blank canvas you could transform into the character – Indian princess, 20s vamp, Mother Courage, Oxford don, 94-year-old wife.
I’ve always said that I’ve been acting my whole life, and everyone always told me, ‘you should be an actress professionally.’ I’ve heard that my whole life, so it’s kind of cool to think, ‘yeah, they were right.’ I can do this and I’m good at it, and that feels really good.
What do you call an electorate that seems prone to acting out irrationally, is full of inchoate rage, and is constantly throwing fits and tantrums? You call it teenaged.
Coal mining is tough. Acting is just tedious.
The exciting part of acting, I don’t know how else to explain it, are those moments when you surprise yourself.
I do figure every angle of a guy I’m acting – but not consciously ’til afterward.
Because Naughty Dog relies on their facial team to hand animate the faces of each game character and they do such a remarkable job, I think you can be more realistic with your acting. It gives the story and what’s happening to you the feeling that it’s a game.
Acting is happy agony.
Acting has always been such escapism for me.
I think one of the great things about acting is the instant gratification: you just get up and start being a part of the story. The immediacy is something you get really addicted to.
We lived and breathed acting.
The most important thing in acting is honesty. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.
I always wanted to be an actor, but with a speech impediment it’s kind of tough. I decided to roll the dice and take an acting class, which was very, very nerve-wracking… my stomach would just be in knots.
Making a film or doing a play are completely different experiences and entirely fulfilling, but completely unique. I also think one complements the other. People often say that theater is about flexing your muscles, and is actually real acting, whereas I sort of disagree.
Stop acting as if life is a rehearsal. Live this day as if it were your last. The past is over and gone. The future is not guaranteed.
Most of my acting has been for fantasy-based shows like ‘A Korean Odyssey.’ But for ‘Vagabond,’ it is totally different.
It’s always agonising to separate my life as an actress and personal life. Just because I’m happy with my acting life doesn’t mean I’m happy with my personal life. I’m always making an effort to balance between the two.
I need to go where people are serious about acting.
If you want to be an actor, you have to do it because you love acting, not because you want to be a celebrity.
You’ve got to know what you want. This is central to acting on your intentions. When you know what you want, you realize that all there is left then is time management. You’ll manage your time to achieve your goals because you clearly know what you’re trying to achieve in your life.
When we say gender is performed, we usually mean that we’ve taken on a role or we’re acting in some way and that our acting or our role playing is crucial to the gender that we are and the gender that we present to the world.
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.
I love acting. It is so much more real than life.
I’ve always had ambition, and the acting was successful and put my name on the map, but it was never the plan to stop there.
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.
I enjoyed working with Stephen Merchant. He was wonderful. I’ve been such a big fan of his acting.
Acting is not about being famous, it’s about exploring the human soul.
I have a fine level of recognition in the business and among the acting community now, so I consider myself one of the lucky ones. If I didn’t think that, there would be something wrong with me. I’m grateful and thankful for what I’ve got.
If I’m acting at all, it’s going to be under Marvel contract, or I’m going to be directing. I can’t see myself pursuing acting strictly outside of what I’m contractually obligated to do.
I hit the ground running, without a lot of training, so I had to do whatever I could do to survive as a professional, and if that meant being that character 24/7 and acting out, I was going to do that. I lived those characters, I brought them home with me.
I was lined up to do this honors degree course in biology, of all things, for no better reason than I got high marks in it. I decided I didn’t want to be removing worms’ hearts for the rest of my life in Northern Ontario. I thought I would try acting. So, I went to England to study drama. I got Shakespeared out.
My father owned some Laundromats, and when I was 10, he had me in there making change and being an attendant. He taught me that on weekends, you had to get up and go to work. That has been a big help in acting.
The only way to play football is with reckless abandon, or they’ll knock your beard off. And with acting, you have to pull all the stops to make it work.
Acting is like golf: analysis leads to paralysis.
I live in the same house as I did when I started acting. My life hasn’t changed. Only people around me have changed with how they look at me.
My first acting experience was a non-speaking role as a robot. My costume was a cardboard box covered in tinfoil, but I was so shy I refused to go on stage.
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.
The audience has reacted well to my comic timing. But, I also have other aspects to my acting talent.
I always loved acting and improv and sketch comedy and theater, which I did at a local youth theater.
I feel like after acting, the other half of why I love this business is the opportunity to work with and meet people who inspire you. That it pays my rent is a good bonus.
I’ve always said that acting found me. I didn’t really find it.
A man of knowledge lives by acting, not by thinking about acting.
My approach to acting is the ‘let’s pretend’ school of acting.
One must take things lightly, after all, we are entertainers and acting isn’t rocket science. The trick is, not to take criticism to the heart or analyse things too much.
It’s important for me to be free and know I’m acting for myself. I do things because I want to, and that’s important. You want to be your own person.
I can’t afford to step away from acting, but the one thing I’ve learnt after all these years is that I don’t fit in. It’s very difficult to be at the mercy of other people’s whims and visions.
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 lifting a 400-pound feather. It’s a feather, how hard could it be? And yet, you go to lift it and it’s heavy. For that reason, I love it, because it’s very hard and difficult and challenging and obviously I want to learn more.
I’ll say initially acting was my first love, and that’s what I pursued. But then, so far as even my first day on a film set, and just watching how things were set up, I just said, ‘I think I want to be in charge.’ I am very much type-A. I am a bit of a control freak.
The point of acting is to pretend you’re someone else and sell a story.
Acting is magical. Change your look and your attitude, and you can be anyone.
Acting, the arts in general, is a magnet for the wounded of society.
People do more important jobs than acting in film that should be recognised, but for some reason it’s big money, so people are elevated in status. If I was a bus driver, I’m sure you wouldn’t be interviewing me.
When I look at acting careers that I really admire, I see that it’s been a precise decision-making process for these people. They make decisions based on what they love, and they do only the things that they are passionate about. They play only characters that they can’t stop thinking about.
Acting was never planned.
There is a growing frustration that the EU is seen as something that is done to people rather than acting on their behalf. And this is being intensified by the very solutions required to resolve the economic problems.
Acting is a learning process. And what you are doing in your early films is essentially picking up the nuances, the tricks of your trade. And somewhere along the line, you become analytical and learn to enjoy what you are doing.
I love acting because it’s a bit of an escape. It gives you the ability to reinvent yourself. They say that acting is the shy man’s revenge.
I know very little about acting. I’m just an incredibly gifted faker.
I was like the class clown in school so I guess I would say I did like the attention. In church I did a lot of plays, my mother made me play characters, do a lot of drama and acting, trying to become someone else. So it helped me create who I am, to create Snoop Dogg.
I never took an acting class, so I’ve made all my mistakes on film.
Whether it’s music or acting, that creativity all comes from the same source.
I love doing both animation and live acting.
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.
The exciting part of acting, I don’t know how else to explain it, are those moments when you surprise yourself.
If a critic doesn’t think I can act, it’s because I’m not acting. That’s me – and that’s the way I act.
Life’s like a play: it’s not the length, but the excellence of the acting that matters.
There is less pressure as a character actor. It generally means that you will be acting for all of your life, which is my intention. It is not my intention to just be a rich and famous person, that would be pretty boring.
Acting is magical. Change your look and your attitude, and you can be anyone.
I have become more and more afraid about marriage and parenting. I think it’s because I am getting older. Of course, there will be a lot to learn, and I also know that the experience will help in my acting.
I’ve given up on trying to explain myself, or trying to set the record straight, or trying to get people to understand what I’m really like as a man, outside of my acting, outside of my job.
I don’t think that acting is as youth-obsessed as the general culture. In acting, as you get older, you get better, and the parts you get improve, too. But that’s only true for a man, not a woman.
Once I came to acting, it was almost a thing where there weren’t enough hours in the day to work on stuff because I was so passionate about it.
I always thought acting was all lights, camera, action. It’s a job; you have to do your job correctly.
A lot of artists fail when they try to act, and they flop. So when I get into acting, it’s going to be to do it well, something good, something of quality. I want people to say, ‘Wow, that movie’ – or that show or whatever – ‘turned out really well.’
Acting is how I’ll be able to change how Latinos are viewed in media and change how little girls see and talk about themselves.
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.
To me, teamwork is the beauty of our sport, where you have five acting as one. You become selfless.
I can’t do method acting. I feel there is a different energy that comes when an actor is spontaneous.
I didn’t become an actor to be famous. I genuinely love acting and never expected to make a penny at it.
In retrospect, I’ve become wise in playing my roles in terms of acting techniques. But looking at my old performances when I was young like what I did in ‘My Lovely Sam Soon’ or ‘Secret Garden,’ there is something fresh and daring that I want to emulate now.
The camera lens or the television camera is still just a proscenium arch. And as a great old character actor once said to me, wherever you’re acting, you reach up and take hold of the proscenium arch, and you pull it down around your shoulders.
When I first started acting, I was just crap.
I have four to five months, tops, per year to give to my acting work.
I was an electrician, and I started acting as a hobby because I needed a distraction – I was bored! And only when I started did I think, ‘Sheesh, what have I gotten into?’ I had to go after it fully; I just had to.
I started off thinking that I just needed one shot to prove myself, but then I realised that I was only going to learn about acting by doing it.
If I’m still acting at 46, I’ll be surprised.
I’ve learned enough times in life that saying something is completely different than acting upon it.
Acting and making art is just something I love to do, and I love to tell stories that feel important, honest and necessary.
I mean, sometimes… a comedian becomes an actor, and they just don’t deliver, because the bottom line of comedy is to be funny, and the bottom line of acting is to be truthful, and they get that mixed up sometimes, or don’t even notice that that’s the thing.
When I began acting, my biggest fear was whether the audience will appreciate the kind of films I do.
When I’m composing a scene for the first time, I try to imitate my character. The less critical distance the better – particularly when they’re acting badly.
When I’m not acting, I do like to take a year off at a time, at least if I can, just in order to keep acting exciting – otherwise I get bored very quickly.
I was inspired by lots of people, certainly in acting and in writing and stuff, but I never wanted to be somebody else.
As I’ve always been open to learning, directors have helped me with the nuances of acting.
I started acting when I was young, and I didn’t go to drama school. It was always something that I did alongside going to school and being a normal person.
Lead by example. Women often wait for permission instead of acting, and I try to encourage bold action.
I realized that acting was the thing I was still maybe the best at. Of the things I felt like I was good at, that was the thing that came the most naturally to me.
If you do things, whether it’s acting or music or painting, do it without fear – that’s my philosophy. Because nobody can arrest you and put you in jail if you paint badly, so there’s nothing to lose.
Acting isn’t really a creative profession. It’s an interpretative one.
I love acting, but it’s much more fun taking the kids to the zoo.
My acting technique is to look up at God just before the camera rolls and say, ‘Give me a break.’
There are so many actresses I want to write for. I see them, and I think, ‘Why is she not playing that lead? What’s happened to that actress?’ I think all I can do is to write parts for women, to say, ‘Keep going, keep acting, because there are parts for you. There will be those plays.’
I didn’t go to film school. I didn’t graduate college with an acting degree or a theater degree. I didn’t have the traditional route of training.
When I came out to L. A., I got a part in an episode of ‘Star Trek: Voyager,’ and I hired an acting coach.
I’ve been drawing since I was a little kid, but it’s not something I love to do every day. If there’s one thing I love to do every day, it’d probably be acting. I can act every day. I’d happily do it, you don’t have to pay me. But that’s one thing I’d love to do and get paid for.
I may not have made humongous sum of money through acting, but I have enough to lead a stress free life.
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.
I think a lot of what you do in acting, and for the most part singing and dancing and everything, is trial and error. It’s all about just seeing what works, and if it does, to use it, and if not, to throw it away.
I love to cook; I love to bake. It’s, like, my favorite thing besides acting.
I think people are always really surprised when they realise I’m not a very serious person and that I’m not tremendously serious about acting. I don’t like to rehearse; I hate improv. Directors that don’t like to talk, they’re my favourite ones.
More and more I think of privatisation as being not just about the takeover of resources and power by corporate interests, but as the retreat of citizens to private life and private space, screened from solidarity with strangers and increasingly afraid or even unable to imagine acting in public.
If you want to be an actor today you have to come prepared with the entire package, which includes acting, dancing, action, PR skills, building your physique and all of it. Otherwise, nobody is going to touch you.
I don’t plan my acting. If I had to copy someone, it would be someone like the legendary Sridevi. I am really bad at copying people. I am very spontaneous.
Acting is a trial-and-error business. Every actor has a few movies on their resume that they’re not terribly proud of, but that’s how you learn.
The hardest part when I decided to move into acting was trusting I’d made the right decision.
I need to be performing. I need to be acting. I need to be designing a condo and ripping down walls and buying new plates and looking at fashion magazines. There always has to be some movement in the artistic department for me to not get really, really low.
The number one job of an actor is to be a character and never let the acting show.
The secret to acting is don’t act. Be you, with add-ons.
I never had had a large group of friends, so I often felt a little out of place and like I was in a different mindset from everyone else around me because I was so focused on my acting career.
I can only speak for me… but in my life, I find that, in sobriety, I feel much more, and I have much more depth. I also feel – not to segue, but as being a parent of five kids, I can bring much more to my acting, and so I’m all about anything that gives you more feeling and more depth.
The knighthood for my humanitarian work meant more than if it had been for my acting.
I think by eighth grade I knew I wanted to be an actor. I’d done church plays and stuff, but my first actual acting class was in eighth grade. I was obsessed with it.
Acting is not an important job in the scheme of things. Plumbing is.
Romeo and Juliet’ is two love addicts acting out, and look how that ended.
My acting career began on the streets of New York. When I was a cop, I played many impressive roles, from derelict to a doctor, and my life often depended on my performance.
Growing up as an Asian American in this society, there were a lot of times where you feel isolated or out of place as an Asian. And growing up in White America, that’s absolutely my experience. And I think that’s why I got into acting because I wanted to be anybody else but Asian.
John Ventimiglia, who was on ‘The Sopranos,’ was in my first acting class and we have been friends since that time. Alec Baldwin was in my class back then, Sean Young and Andrew McCarthy.
I really like acting in French. It’s actually quite different for me, from acting in English. It’s fun acting in a foreign language. You’re liberated or freed from preconceptions.
I don’t think my approach to acting is all necessarily in service of the character. I think, selfishly, I’ve put it in service of myself, my perspective on the world and helping my life.
Acting by yourself is pretty darn hard, especially having to do physical comedy.
I was always a closet lover of acting. My mom was very practical. She never, ever restricted our dreams, always told us we could do or be anything. Then I said, ‘Maybe I want to be an actor’. And she said, ‘Maybe not that’.
I love playing guitar. I grew up with my dad playing. But acting is definitely the forefront, I guess I’d say, in terms of career and something that I really enjoy and feel lucky to be able to do.
For me, becoming a man had a lot to do with learning communication, and I learned about that by acting.
I don’t know how it is in other industries, but as far as our industry is concerned, everybody takes their energy from the director. I myself was very exhausted, but I was acting as if I was full of energy and was pumping it into the whole team.
Hypocrisy is not a way of getting back to the moral high ground. Pretending you’re moral, saying you’re moral is not the same as acting morally.
Acting has always been special and will continue to remain so.
I have enjoyed acting, but getting into production is hectic. I am not made for it.
In a work capacity I’m only interested in acting and producing.
After high school, I was going to move out to L.A. and try to pursue my dreams of acting. My parents said, ‘That’s fine. We support you, but you have to go to school,’ which was fine because I’m a studious person anyway; I enjoy it.
I never consciously got into comedy. It was sort of one of those things where I was a theater student, I was acting, I was doing comedy, I was doing dramatic stuff, so it’s been something that I’ve always done and enjoyed doing and had an instinct to be relatively good at.
If it seems like you’re doing work when you’re acting, then you’re doing something wrong.
Although we’re acting, and our minds know that we’re acting, our bodies don’t quite know that we’re acting. So even when you’re watching someone acting like they’re dying, your body has like a true real response to it.
Once an economy reaches a certain level of acceleration… the Fed is no longer with you… The Fed, instead of trying to get the economy moving, reverts to acting like the central bankers they are and starts worrying about inflation and things getting too hot.
After you have built a fanbase, people call you to promote their films. Often, it leads to acting offers. After that, it’ just a matter of your film working.
My brother’s my teacher, my mentor, and we both learnt all the acting basics from our father.
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.
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!
I had always been the theater nerd at Northwestern University. I knew I wanted to do acting, but I hated the idea of being this cliche – a girl from L.A. who decides to be an actress.
No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.
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.
When I started studying acting, I was enamoured of actors who used movement to enhance the language.
I want to open businesses, invest in different things, and put more time into modeling and acting.
I think, at the end of the day, acting and activism are both about empathy. You’re trying to get people to see other people as real and human. And to care.
Something I learned in the Marine Corps that I’ve applied to acting is, one, taking direction, and then working with a group of people to accomplish a mission and knowing your role within that team.
I’ve been building a future for myself outside of acting.
Being in an acting class, you always feel like, you know, you’re insecure, a lot of ways, when the teacher is commenting on your performance.
I’ve always enjoyed acting. When we were younger, my sisters and I would put on plays for our parents.
I grew up dancing, so that was always my first dream. But I also have a passion for acting. I would love to step inside of a character and be somebody that I’m not, because I feel like it just gives me an outlet to express myself without being me.
Acting is just a part of my life, and I like to lead life on my terms.
Acting in anger and hatred throughout my life, I frequently precipitated what I feared most, the loss of friendships and the need to rely upon the very people I’d abused.
Upon graduation, I hit a wall. All of my good friends from UCLA were taking on jobs they were passionate about, and I felt left behind. It took a bit of soul searching, but in the end, I finally had the guts to pursue acting.
From there I did a one year theatre acting course in Fife, and then three years of drama school in London.
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.
Strive to be authentic all the time. That’s sort of my philosophy on life, which applies to acting.
I’ve always thought of acting as more of an exercise in empathy, which is not to be confused with sympathy. You’re trying to get inside a certain emotional reality or motivational reality and try to figure out what that’s about so you can represent it.
The first year at Juilliard is, I think, the best. And partly why I left – I only went one year. Partly why I felt okay leaving is that the most important elements, I believe, happen in the first year. What they do is they tear down all your conceptions of acting, and they take away all your tricks that you’ve learned.
I don’t like to spend a lot of money on haircuts: I’ll sometimes grow my hair and get an acting job and get them to cut it for free. I think for a lady, though, it’s okay to spend a lot on a haircut.
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.
Since Nandita Das comes from a different school of acting, I had to behave in a particular manner. Then with the boys – Rahul Dev, Purab Kohli and Akaash Saigal – it was another ball game.
I think my being such a nomad let me into acting. I was always having to create a new image whenever we moved.
Believe it or not, I kind of went into professional wrestling so I could get an avenue into acting.
Acting as a profession came to me by chance: in 1946, after the war, I was having lunch with my cousin, who was the Italian ambassador, and he asked, ‘What are you going to do now you’re out of uniform?’ I said, ‘I’m pretty inventive, and I can imitate people,’ and he said, ‘Have you thought about being an actor?’
A truly good book teaches me better than to read it. I must soon lay it down, and commence living on its hint. What I began by reading, I must finish by acting.
For me, I guess I’m the acting equivalent of somebody that jumps off buildings and parachutes.
‘Masoom’ was like a picnic for all of us. We kids just wanted to have fun acting in the film. We never realised when the film was completed. When we did, we realised the party was over.
Will Smith is my favorite actor, because he has so much variety in his career. He’s done all types of roles, played in all types of worlds, and to me, that’s the fun of acting. That’s why I started doing it when I was eight years old, because you get to be whatever you want.
I go to Stanford, and I’m an economics major, not thinking I’m going to do anything with acting. A professor came to the dorm where I lived looking for people to audition for an August Wilson play, ‘Joe Turner’s Come And Gone.’ I gave it a shot, got one of the lead roles in the play.
I got into the acting business very young.
I was 36, and I had decided to quit acting because it was so disappointing.
When I was a kid, I used to pretend to be Bond; I used to make up scenarios and irritate my sister and annoy my mother and father pretending to be someone else, so I kind of was already acting when I was a child. I just didn’t really know it.
I was trained classically in violin and voice, which led to musical theater. Then I left the music scene to chase acting, which is when ‘Neighbours’ came along. It was a fantastic playground for actors, and the cast around me taught me a lot.
I am inclined to acting. I like to act and I like being an actor.
I am able to do social service only because of the name I gained from acting.
Acting with Denzel is like playing tennis with someone that’s better than you. You either play better tennis or get blown off the court.
In modeling, because you’re the center of attention, it builds up people’s egos. Sometimes people lose touch with reality. But that happens with acting, too.
Acting careers don’t come out fully formed – not unless your name is Jaden Smith and your dad has done it all.
As we mature and grow older we collect a lot of baggage, and a lot of that stuff you collect on life’s journey gets in the way of acting. My kids can imagine a character and transform in the blink of an eye. It’s so simple for kids, so complex for adults.
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.
Money was always on my mind when I was growing up. So I was always wondering how we were going to afford this and that. Acting seemed to be a shortcut out of the mess.
Leadership is a way of thinking, a way of acting and, most importantly, a way of communicating.
The art of acting consists in keeping people from coughing.
I do focus my energy on music, but it’s just the way that the industry works. I kind of have to take what I can get when it comes to acting and show up so they’ll hire me. And music I get to do when I have time. It’s not that I focus less, it’s just the way it works.
I don’t really want to do movies, but I tried. I don’t feel like acting is my thing; I think music is my strong area.
Strangely enough, as I explored these abandoned malls, I found myself acting like a kid all over again. At times jumping up on to nearby fountain ledges trying to balance myself as I became mesmerized all over again by the futuristic skylights that dangled fearlessly over my head.
The people of God want pastors, not clergy acting like bureaucrats or government officials.
I sang when I was in primary school, and I did singing at Sylvia Young: no acting at all.
I started playing piano when I was 6. And I knew that wanted to be involved in that form of expression, whether it was through music, or acting, or dancing, or painting, or writing.
I get so tired of people acting like, you know, black men and women never help each other, never support each other.
If I had to say the secret recipe for acting melodrama, I think it comes from myself in real life. I have a belief that when I do melo scenes, I try to make them less cheesy.
Nothing gives me more pleasure than acting. But I don’t enjoy going for award functions or giving interviews.
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.
‘Evening Shade’ was such an eye-opening experience. I was 19 when I went on that show. I had barely had an acting class. So as Burt Reynolds continued to bring me back for the next three years, I learned so much from him and all the other legends that were on the show.
Plastic surgery and breast implants are fine for people who want that, if it makes them feel better about who they are. But, it makes these people, actors especially, fantasy figures for a fantasy world. Acting is about being real being honest.
I love acting and don’t find it to be very hard. I recognize when I’ve nailed it, and I can be very proud of myself.
If you’ve ever been around a group of actors, you’ve noticed, no doubt, that they can talk of nothing else under the sun but acting. It’s exactly the same way with baseball players. Your heart must be in your work.
Rohit Shetty liked my acting in the movie ‘Theeran,’ which released in 2017. He believed that I would justify the role of a baddie in ‘Sooryavanshi.’
I have a long way to go as far as my acting career is concerned. Lots of milestones are to be achieved and dreams to be fulfilled. I would someday want to do playback singing, too, as I am a very passionate singer.
I played baseball in college, and then I went to Russia to study acting and played some pro ball over there.
My husband is an actor, and we don’t talk about acting at home.
I went into acting as psychotherapy, and it’s still a work in progress.
Sarcasm is weird. Even not in acting, in life I feel like ‘sarcastic’ is a word that people use to describe me sometimes so when I meet someone, it’s almost like they feel like they have to also be sarcastic, but it can sometimes just come off as mean if it’s not used in the right way.
Acting isn’t something you do. Instead of doing it, it occurs. If you’re going to start with logic, you might as well give up. You can have conscious preparation, but you have unconscious results.
Dane DeHaan, certainly, is kind of the best friend I’ve made through acting, in terms of another actor. He’s fantastic.
One of the things I want to do that’s outside the realm of acting and the arts – although both have their place in this – is ending childhood hunger here in America.
Acting is a masochistic form of exhibitionism. It is not quite the occupation of an adult.
My belief about acting in one foot on a banana peel and the other one in the grave.
Just let the wardrobe do the acting.
I have no respect for acting where I’m concerned.
I figured out that I was interested in acting while at NYU.
I would like to work with my ideal type, Song Hye Kyo sunbae. Although she has an elegant and classic style, her charisma is also strong, and her acting talent is outstanding. If we act together, I think I could learn a lot from her. But I’d probably be nervous a lot of times.
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.
I studied acting at Boston University. I was in the theater department there. Somewhere in there I decided that wasn’t what I was going to do and I went to the B.F.A. film program at N.Y.U.
I’ve always been a creative person since I was young. I enjoyed art, museums, plays, but it wasn’t until I was about 10 that my mother encouraged me to choose a career, and it was acting.
I can walk into a room and create a good ambience. I was taught all about this back when I studied acting. One of the things they would teach you is how to send out positive signals when you enter a room. I am glad I learned this.
I remember my choir teacher in high school told me, ‘When in doubt, sing loud.’ I’m a terrible singer, but I always auditioned for the musicals, and would get cast in them because I really would just put it all out there. That was really good advice, and I think it works for everything, not just acting.
I don’t think of bouncing between acting and singing as a transition but rather as an expansion. I love both crafts so deeply, I feel my heart and soul have no choice but to explore both. I could never choose between the two of them. I am passionate about both for equal yet different reasons.
If any successes has come to me, it came because I insisted on thinking things through. That’s all I was capable of doing in life, was thinking pretty hard about trying to get the right answer, and then acting on it. I never learned to do anything else.
We saw the band as an acting job – it was an extension of ‘Byker Grove.’ We were even still called PJ and Duncan.
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.
Men acquire a particular quality by constantly acting in a particular way.
With acting, you have to just tell the truth in each moment.
Acting is the most bizarre profession. You can stay in it for years and not really be in it and be waiting for someone to give you an opportunity. It’s like when I watch ‘American Idol’ and see people who have been told to believe in themselves at all costs: It’s not always a good idea.
I like to feel that something’s alive in acting, like something’s really going on.
I was always drawn to performing. I took improv and acting classes during the summers and was involved in middle and high school plays. But when I discovered indie and punk music in high school, those things sort of took over.
I think personal growth has much to do with acting ability.
When I started acting… the community was largely Chinese-American or Japanese-American, so even then I felt like a minority in the minority.
I feel an acting stint would help me widen my reach as a singer. Being an actor would let me reach out to people who may not have heard my kind of songs.
I am a soldier, convinced that I am acting on behalf of soldiers.
I remember I was so crabby in my third trimester – I got gestational diabetes because I’d been acting like I was in a one-woman pie-eating contest.
A multitude of causes unknown to former times are now acting with a combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind, and unfitting it for all voluntary exertion to reduce it to a state of almost savage torpor.
When I went to college, I did clothing and textiles. It really wasn’t until I moved to New York, my second night in, I did stand-up. I took a wild left turn, and instead of going back and finishing school at FIT, I started doing stand-up and acting.
Acting touches nerves you have absolutely no control over.
It’s a career that’s enticing because you go on stage, for example, and people clap. You get that affirmation, but you can’t go into acting for that because it’s really your own self-belief that’s going to get you through.
I can never turn my back on acting.
Whatever it is, if you draw, you paint, you’re a carpenter, you play football, the more you do it, you’re a journalist, the more stories you write, the more people you interview and navigate your way through these different personalities to get your story, the better you’re going to get at it. Acting’s no different.
There’s not a day that I don’t work on vocals, have vocal coaches, go to acting classes, read books.
With any part you play, there is a certain amount of yourself in it. There has to be, otherwise it’s just not acting. It’s lying.
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.
I used to represent Mount Carmel College in cultural activities, and a friend in the team told me to try my hand at acting.
There’s a lot to the story. And there are a lot of things I’ve learned about myself and about love, and I’m really grateful for the lessons, and I hope I can share that through art. I look for projects that allow me to do that, whether it’s music or acting.
I can do everything with ease on the stage, whereas in real life I feel too big and clumsy. So I didn’t choose acting. It chose me.
Making a pretty picture, an image, is a completely different thing from acting to camera.
I have done hard jobs in the past, and acting isn’t one of them.
Absolutely not, because in acting I’ve found a domain that suits me perfectly. And that is so utterly rare.
Like anything else, acting can become boring – a chore, really – if there isn’t any challenge. And I like taking challenges. Just when people think they have me figured out, I like to surprise them.
It’s not just that individuals have lost faith in the integrity of their leaders, it’s that they no longer believe society’s most powerful institutions are acting in their interests.
So if I keep making mistakes on Broadway or tape or film, producing, directing or acting, I can go along and do it – so long as I’m not investing too much capital in these things.
Berries are the healthiest fruit, offering potential protection against cancer and heart disease, boosting the immune system and acting as a guard for the liver and brain.
What’s been nice is that I’ve been able to direct from a very idealistic place. I’ve never had to make my living as a director, which gave me a chance to choose material I feel passionate about. The directing allows me to not have to grab any acting role that comes along. I can pick and choose a little bit.
I would be the worst acting coach ever, because I have no idea what I’m doing.
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.
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.
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.
Acting should be bigger than life. Scripts should be bigger than life. It should all be bigger than life.
The most interesting thing about acting is when you go to the dark places, that’s a lot of energy. When you go to the happiest places, it’s also a lot of energy.
I love both acting and casting, and the idea will be to pursue both.
I’m one of five; I have three sisters, so I’ve always had three best girlfriends. Actually, I’m the middle child, so it’s no surprise I went into acting! There’s a need to be seen.
In life, you have to keep certain parts of yourself in check because you want to be a decent human being. But one of the guilty pleasures of acting is that sometimes you get to let a little something out that you don’t in life because it’s not right.
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.
Acting provides the fulfillment of never being fulfilled. You’re never as good as you’d like to be. So there’s always something to hope for.
It stands to the everlasting credit of science that by acting on the human mind it has overcome man’s insecurity before himself and before nature.
I have always been into all kinds of sports, and have blended acting with sports.
Comedy is acting out optimism.
Acting’s incredibly enjoyable, but sometimes it doesn’t feel quite enough. I’ve also written a script about the life of Eleanor of Aquitaine. This will make me sound like a female Kenneth Branagh, but I can’t think of anything nicer than directing myself from a script I wrote.
If you don’t wake up and have your own thing, whether it’s writing or reading or traveling or acting or dancing or singing or being a mother or a father, something that drives you, then it’s all worth nothing. One of the key elements in happiness is purpose.
Acting must be scaled down for the screen. A drawing room is a lot smaller than a theatre auditorium.
I had taken an acting class at Berkeley – I was on the track team, and a friend of mine on the team said, ‘You should take an acting class. It’s just like recess.’ So I viewed it as a simple credit.
Acting is like a Halloween mask that you put on.
It’s hard to talk about acting because I don’t think it’s quite as explicit as a lot of people might think. And that’s probably the best thing about it.
Acting is completely different from the standup world. You have these 12- or 14-hour days, but you have a great time doing it. It’s like hanging out with your friends.
Acting is the most minor of gifts. After all, Shirley Temple could do it when she was four.
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.
I wanted to go to drama school, but when I got the part in ‘Falling,’ I got an agent, so it seemed a good idea to work. I always did a lot of singing and dancing, so I am glad it worked out that way. I would like to study stage acting at some point, though.
I suppose that was my first bit of acting, the acquisition of an English accent. It was really just an attempt to be understood.
It’s important to have people around you with enough confidence to say if you are not acting in a good way. Normally, when you are at the top, people say everything is fantastic. Probably in that moment it is what you want to hear, but it’s best to be reminded how to act properly.
The truth is that to enjoy acting one must be an exhibitionist at heart, one must revel in those exposures of the emotions which would be agonizing to a shy or reserved person. All the great actors have been and are exhibitionists.
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.
Acting has always been a way for me to express the emotions I had buried. If I hadn’t acted, I would have gone insane. In my acting class, I could let out my real tears and everyone thought it was the character. But no, it was me.
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.
Thinking is easy, acting is difficult, and to put one’s thoughts into action is the most difficult thing in the world.
Acting is merely the art of keeping a large group of people from coughing.
My first paid acting gig in the States was playing a lizard-transforming, shape-shifting witch in ‘Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters’, I believe.
A man of knowledge lives by acting, not by thinking about acting.
I went to college at QUT: Queensland University of Technology. I studied for a Bachelors in finance and acting.
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.
I didn’t fall in love with acting until I did a few films. Now, I couldn’t live without it.
Acting deals with very delicate emotions. It is not putting up a mask. Each time an actor acts he does not hide; he exposes himself.
I did do a local musical, ‘Bubblin’ Brown Sugar.’ I played the young Sweet Georgia Brown. I was 13 years old. After that, I just decided that I had to pick one thing, acting or singing, and concentrate on that.
Ballet, there’s a right way to do things, and it’s black and white, and it’s all striving for perfection. Acting is not that way. It’s very gray, and the messier you can be, the better. The mistakes that you make are the gold and the beautiful stuff.
Acting is just playing the violin in an orchestra. Directing is being the conductor.
Writing is a very strenuous thing – it’s like banging your head against a wall. At the end of the day, acting is better, just because nobody ever asked me if I wanted a Pellegrino in the writer’s room.
Acting, believe it or not, can get very self-involved! I feel fortunate to have been able to work on things with people who have a very specific point of view and perspective, and who feel like they’re doing something very active.
‘She’s Gotta Have It’ and ‘School Daze,’ I really didn’t know what I was doing. And the biggest indicator of that was the acting. ‘Do the Right Thing’ was like the first film where I really felt comfortable working with actors.
Acting is a tough industry. There are a lot of kids out there at drama schools and not a lot of money about, especially as the arts are being cut.
I’m going to write a book, continue acting, continue motivational speaking and just share with people who I am and what I’ve learned in my second chance of life and pass it on to people in their first chance of life.
I met my agent when I was 10 years old on a family skiing vacation. He asked if I was interested in acting, and I had been doing school plays. A couple of years later, I called him up, and I started auditioning.
Having an interview in English is difficult for me, but acting in English is much harder. Because when I’m acting in English, if someone points out bad pronunciation or accent, I cannot focus on my emotions anymore, so it was very hard.
Movie acting is about covering the machinery. Stage acting is about exposing the machinery. In cinema, you should think the actor is playing himself, if he’s that good. It looks very easy. It should. But it’s not, I assure you.
Music I can discover a part of myself that I haven’t been able to for a long time, and acting is the opposite. I’m in love with both of them and I would never choose one over the other.
I probably never would have been hired on Broadway had I not moved out to L.A. and pursued acting and film, which is sad, really.
Begin within. If it shows up in your life, it’s coming to tell you something about you that you’re acting like you don’t know. Something about yourself, or your relationship with God.
I would say that ‘Shake It Up’ was a chance for me to do two things I really love: acting and dancing.
A lot of people in my world – in the acting world – have either lost friends to Aids or live with HIV because its origin in our culture, in New York for instance, was in the gay community.
I like to get far away from myself when I’m acting.
For acting, classes are a necessity, but for modeling it’s really just knowing who you are and knowing how to sell yourself.
I never wanted to be a model. My modelling career was nothing but a stepping stone to my acting career and that’s all I ever saw it as. A pointless rock in the river that has to be stepped on in order to get to the meaningful oasis of acting.
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.
Labor believes in sustainability. We believe in acting on climate change, not just talking about it.
Honestly, if acting never worked out, I would have done music.
I’ve always found that acting has been quite a hard thing to pre-manage because so much of it is spontaneous and the circumstances so uncontrolled.
Producing is the hardest of the three because there is almost no closure. Every time you solve a problem, another one pops up. Directing is second, and acting is the most fun.
Acting, for me, is giving to your co-actors.
Music is my life – acting’s just a hobby.
If you can’t get an acting job, then go backstage. Or take tickets.
Acting is the perfect idiot’s profession.
I am always acting, be at a party, at work or in office. My attitude changes from meeting to meeting, from being serious to intense to funny, depending on who is in the room.
