Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I've failed a lot, you know, in football, and I've gone on a lot of auditions, been told no, been told I'm not right, so I know what failure feels like. It's about the work.
I think, culturally, stories are important, whether it be cinema, whether it be by word of mouth - which I don't even know if we do anymore, as it all seems to be social media.
Who would I be if I complained about having a father that provided for me? Who would I be if I was complaining about having a father who loved me? That would make me a real jerk.
My mom had an encounter with the KKK when she was, I think, 7 years old in North Carolina. She snuck into a cross burning. I'm so lucky she didn't get caught, because I wouldn't be here.
Oh, talking about private school, man, I had cornrows, and when I picked 'em out, certain people that didn't look like me always wanted to touch 'em. One time, I just said, 'Yo, hell no.'
I had a father who was active, present. There are people out there that never knew their fathers, didn't have their father's support. If I were to complain, that would be real sad. How dare I?
As my father started ascending in the business, people around me started to treat me different. Our lives changed. So that anxiety, that sort of resentment, I just funneled it through football.
I got a scholarship, so I was getting my independence and not paying for school. And then here comes the NFL. 'Now you got an opportunity to get drafted? Guess we'll do that.' I did, all right.
Football is the ultimate team sport. You're dependent on 10 other people on the field to have success on a particular play to get to the common goal, which is the win. On a set, we need everybody doing their job and pulling their weight.
I wanna work with filmmakers that love, are enthusiastic about their process - about the process - about their process and the environment of inclusion and collaboration. I want the people to be able to trust me, and I wanna be able to trust them.
The injury that ended my time in football turned out to be serendipitous. I tore my Achilles while training for a pending tryout with the New York Giants, and when it snapped, so did my career, basically. That's what led me to gain the confidence to get into the acting world on my own terms.
Football helped me with confidence that I needed. It gave me a sense of independence and earning my own money and my own keep. That's what it served. It gave me the strength to be able to deal with rejection, politics, hard work, and being introduced to pain and embracing what's uncomfortable.
There's some men and women out there that are doing their job the right way. They're protecting and serving complete strangers in their communities the right way. And it's a thankless job. Obviously, there's a lot of information out on cops not doing their jobs correctly, but the ones that are should be celebrated.
I've had the acting bug since I was, like, five. But growing up, I saw how people treated me differently when they knew who my father was, even the stuff I did on the field. Sometimes I'd rush for 100 yards, and the headline would be, 'Denzel's son runs for 100 yards.' That's where the suppression of that bug came from.