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Perhaps, despite my objections, the success of films like: 'The Help,' 'Django,' 'The Butler,' or '12 Years a Slave,' will further persuade Hollywood to widen its view and edit its erroneous perception of what a commercial black film can look like.
I never sold any of those "lose 10 pounds every week" scams. I've not changed my tune in all these years. I've seen everything pass by me, and I've been offered millions of dollars to put my name on products that were just lies. And I never did it.
I make it a habit of never trying to judge what an audience might think, only because all points of view are too close, because we're doing it every day, I think that the actor's point of view is sometimes too close to what the material actually is.
If you want to get the body you've always dreamed of, you have to earn it. You can't buy it, you can't rent it. You have to earn it. My formula has always been love yourself, move your body, watch your portions. And it sounds so easy, but it is not.
I prefer to do cable TV because it allows you the time to do other things. I definitely have an eye on doing more work in features and playing different characters, but I am also a big fan of going on vacation and playing golf and going to the beach.
We have a tax code whose complications and levels of unfairness and levels of choosing people to give tax breaks to and choosing people to deny them to is thousands of pages long with endless complications and unbelievable manipulations by everybody.
I know how difficult it is to make a career in the arts, but even if you don't make a career of it, don't lose it as a hobby. Artists often end up in jobs that have nothing to do with their art. But that side needs to be fulfilled - don't give it up.
In film, I think that you do have a little more time to invest in the character compared to television, where you are shooting from the hip and making quick choices. It is the speed of things that is the major difference - certainly in my experience.
In L.A., the waiters think they're stars. Everybody's always trying to pretend that they see stars every day, so there tends to be a false blas' about celebrity sightings in L.A. In some ways, that's a good thing, because it allows you to walk around.
Opera is musical theatre, and the music can teach you so much about the theatre. Very often I use musical terms to think about how I comport myself on stage: I employ 'rubati,' 'ostinati,' 'cadenze.' Finding these parallels is very fascinating for me.
'Damages' was cool. It brought me back to New York for a little while, so that was a lot of fun, and I was obviously very excited about the opportunity to work with Rose Byrne and Glenn Close. I'd been a fan of that show before I started working on it.
I didn't grow up listening to The Smiths, but now I am a fan. I love his music and listened to so much of it for the film. It's not a regular biopic; they picked a part of his life that people don't really know about. You learn what informs his lyrics.
I get an abundance of e-mail every day, some say 'dear Richard, can you call my husband, he weighs 400 pounds...' or 'my 14-year-old is 200 pounds...' or 'I just got divorced, no one wants me, I am 500 pounds.' So I pick up the phone and I call people.
Once you see the entertainment world from both sides, you really get a greater understanding of how it all operates. As an actor going into screenwriting, I was able to understand what type of dialogue feels natural and what an actor could actually say.
The simplicity we are looking for is not found in thought. It knows what you have to listen to in every moment and knows it can never make a mistake. It is the infinite working in the infinite. It projects into this world because we are here to do that.
I was working in financing. I was buying and selling stocks for a market-maker on the options floor at the Pacific Stock Exchange. He took me under his wing and was training me to take over his accounts. That's the career I had embarked on, at the time.
My first big one-person show was basically a combination of my family, me during puberty, embarrassing newspaper articles that were written about me in high school, my first modeling photos, and terrible things that people said about me on the Internet.
There's a difference between knowing what to do when you're rehearsing it, and being able to do it once you're adrenalized and emotional. That's when the injuries occur. Actors all want to try to pretend that they're experts at everything, but we're not.
It's easy to get young gay men to tickle each other, right? Let's come up with a challenge: Let's get heterosexual men. How do we do that? We make it a competition, because then it's not gay. That explains the antipathy behind the gay-journalist comment.
You don't really have time to do other than what's written. It's very rigid. Shows have a certain rhythm that nobody wants disturbed. So a lot of that doesn't take place on television, at least the television I was doing at the time when I first started.
My theater nerd world and my comic friend world are colliding... That's the thing that I was nerdy about, was theatre. I wasn't as much into the comic book stuff. So it's fun to see there are people that are into that that are also theatre nerds like me.
What we need to do is replace the entire tax code. I do not think it makes sense to say, 'Let's just grab money from, quote, the wealthy'... The issue is the tax code's rotten and we should start truly over with a simple code that is fair and transparent.
When I wrapped 'Falling Skies,' I took a trip to the Caribbean to visit my grandma, which is great. I was out there for two weeks in Grenada. Then after that, I went to Poland for two and a half weeks to go watch some of the European soccer championships.
Basically the problem is that if the intellect is looking at or beholding the forms, what it will get is some kind of representation or image of the forms, but it won't actually have the forms, it won't touch them as it were, or it won't incorporate them.
I'm an actor, but it sort of has to feel serious on a different level. I have to be happy with the choices I make now; it can't just be in hopes of creating a better future for myself. It has to bring me fulfillment. I have to find a way to be happy today.
The Bill Cosby I know has been great to me and great for a lot of people. What he's done for comedy and television has been legendary and history-making. What he's done for the black community and education has been invaluable. That's the Bill Cosby I know.
My true inspirations are my kids and my husband. I'm also inspired by stories of my extended family, friends, and even strangers who cause me to look at my life and behavior and encourage me to be the best person, mother, daughter, and friend that I can be.
I don't mind violence, but it's quite an interesting thing for people to deal with. I don't know many people that like fighting. I certainly don't, myself. But it's always interesting to work on a shows where there's so much violence, as a part of the world.
The business model for content is to be paid for it. You can be paid for it either though advertising or subscriptions or some new invention, but right now what we've got is advertising revenue and subscription revenue as the only way to be paid for content.
No one else in my family is an actor or aspires to be, and most of my friends aren't actors. Most of my friends are the people that I grew up with back in Georgia. It's really helpful to be surrounded by a world that's bigger than the entertainment industry.
Again, like I said, we're not trying to censor anyone. If you think drugs are cool, fine. Make that movie. We are not going to stop you, or try to stop you, but we would encourage other people to be a bit more responsible about their portrayal of drug usage.
If you can keep a character fresh and alive for, let's say, six months, working eight nights a week, then you can do anything. You have honed your technique and your skills to such a degree by that point that you are ready to take on all kinds of challenges.
I think that's pretty crucial for it to succeed and be something more than just something you put your kid in front of and turn on the DVD. We wouldn't have got involved if it were just for little kids. We wanted to write something that works on both levels.
We talk a lot about our right to freedom of expression, but we need to talk more about our responsibility to freedom of expression. We all want to be heard, but let's acknowledge the difference between speaking up with intention and speaking up for attention
I did though at least expect him to correct the false statements he made when he was trying to protect the Presidency. Instead, he talked about it as though I had laid it all out there for the taking. I was the buffet and he just couldn't resist the dessert.
I had a job when I was 15 working at a supermarket, and I knocked over a stack of plastic coffee cups. In my anger, I threw one at a concrete wall, and it rebounded back into my head and cut my head open. Stupidest way to get a scar, but it's one that I have.
Traveling, I've met Ghanaian people who have seen me in minor stuff, but they see the name Ato Essandoh, and they recognize it as a Ghanaian name. They come up to me and are always so excited. You don't think about it, but they really absorb American culture.
If we're going to talk about our businesses, we're going to have to talk about them within the constraints of the disclosure rules, without giving guidance, because we're not going to give guidance, because we don't believe that it is a sensible game to play.
When I was in high school, I was dating this girl and wanted to make her birthday really special. I showed up early to school and went around to every single one of her classes and left a rose with her teachers. Each rose had a note with a little inside joke.
You want to be challenged, so you feel like you want to get up and wrestle with the character or enjoy the character - especially with a TV show, because you know you could be doing it for a long time, so you want to make sure it's something you really enjoy.
Self-esteem doesn't come simply from dressing well, but they are both something we can control. It's a missed opportunity when women say they don't have the money, figure, etc., because style is such a way to help cultivate the way women feel about themselves.
As actors, we try to just do the character justice and try to make the writer's intentions come to life. If you do that to the best of your ability, that's really all you can do. All that other stuff, like a warm reception from fans and viewers, is just icing.
The Humpback Trail on New Zealand's South Island is really beautiful. It is a 70 km walk over about four days and is fairly arduous. You go through prehistoric forest and up to the top of Humpback Mountain, where there are amazing views down to the Tasman Sea.
On the flip side, no one has any idea who the hell I am. I felt like I had to prove myself to them. On any new project I'm working on, the first week is nerve-wracking, but especially with these people that I admire so much and who I just want to be equal with.
'Black film,' unless it's lucky enough or creative enough, or timely enough to build a life of its own, hangs subjacent to 'white film' on Hollywood's financial score board... aided and abetted by the supposition that so-called black film has no foreign market.
I don't go into it trying to be this or that because that completely taints and corrupts the work that you're trying to do. But, I'm thankful and that definitely was a surprise. Hopefully, I'll keep doing stuff that remains interesting and fun for the audience.
In New Zealand, we have a one-party disclosure system, where if one of you knows you're being recorded, it's completely fine. It doesn't matter if the other person doesn't know. Look, I'm not breaking new ground by recording people who don't want to be recorded.
Building a more compassionate society is going to be a bilateral exercise between individuals and the brands that represent their aspirations, their values and their truths. People make brands. If people are compassionate, brands will be compassionate in return.
Improv is not something I had a lot of experience with, because for a long time, my only experience in front of a camera was all television, which is pretty rigid script-wise, except for the occasional scene where you toss in an ad-lib just to elongate something.
It's hard to believe that, in the 1970's, America was virtually hunger-free. During the past two decades, we have allowed hunger to attack our most precious resource, our children. We must reinstate and strengthen programs to eliminate this blight on our society.