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The film business has changed and society has changed. I started acting before the internet, which is insane to say. That makes me sound so old! You evolve, and the kind of career I thought I wanted, even six or seven years ago, was completely different from the career I have now, and I couldn't be happier about it. It's been a crazy trip.
Measures of policy are necessarily controlled by circumstances; and, consequently, what may be wise and expedient under certain circumstances might be eminently unwise and impolitic under different circumstances. To persist in acting in the same way under circumstances essentially different would be folly and obstinacy, and not consistency.
My one piece of advice to anyone trying to do acting - this would just be to keep going. It sounds really basic, but I went to 121 auditions my first year in L.A. That is no exaggeration, because I keep lists - I know it's a little psychotic - of every audition that I have ever been to. I went to 121 auditions and I got none. But who cares?
Doing 'All Good Things' really felt like I was acting for myself rather than anyone else. It gave me a freedom I'd never had before, or knew I had, to do whatever I want to, and to argue my opinions and not just feel like the cute girl on set or the girl in a boy's club. I figured out how I could be both. And it's been different ever since.
Besides acting, I love reading books, dancing, singing, and following a few sports. My favorite sport is tennis. I love travelling, and I see a new place every year. Luckily, my job helps me do that very easily. In my spare time, I also spend time watching English TV shows like 'Grey's Anatomy,' 'Modern Family,' 'House MD' and a few others.
There was a little part of me that always felt like I was going to be an actress, but I never acted when I was growing up. I was a dancer. That's all I did, all day, all my life. Maybe this was just where I was meant to be, and somehow I ended up here, but it just felt right. As soon as I started acting, it just felt like it was meant to be.
At the moment, my trajectory isn't to think about acting. I'm absolutely devoted to The Imaginarium, our projects and directing. And watching and enabling other actors do their thing in our studio is hugely rewarding. I expect at some point I'll probably want to go back on stage and do some theater, because I've not done theater in 10 years.
In a field like acting, there is pressure of all kinds, and it becomes tricky to navigate this space. There isn't a particular path laid out to get what you want; you have to figure out ways to get there on your own. And yet, there is no guarantee of getting what you want. At times, you don't know whom to listen to or whose advice to follow.
Acting is rare. You can be rehearsing Ibsen with Sir Richard Eyre and suddenly he has to take a call on his mobile telling him his friend Arthur Miller has died. Or you can come back from a job on the Isle of Man to be told by your agent you're going straight out to South Africa on another shoot. There's not even any time to wash your pants.
Not all television scripts are created equal. And the process is ridiculous. They send you a script and want you in the next morning. That's not how acting works. You can do anything to me as an actor; I'm a very resilient guy. Just don't rush me. If you ask me to do it immediately with no time to prepare, I know you have contempt for actors.
I definitely do have a persona onstage. I definitely am a completely different person, but I'm still having a lot of fun and there's a lot of acting that goes into it. But I haven't been playing many shows when I'm working on acting as much because it's tiring, number one. And number two, it's hard for your mind to makeup what it wants to do.
Well, one thing that I like to do is treat the audience as if they're already kind of at the table - they're already a part of the conversation. They don't need the 101 explanation. It's as if bringing a stranger to the table to sit down with these people who are already acting as peers or friends and opening up and just sharing their stories.
I'm from a working-class family. We didn't have a lot, but we had the arts. You're talking to a guy who is making a living at doing what he loves doing - acting, singing and dancing. So any career ups and downs were not that significant to me; the only things that really powerfully impinged on me were my losses, and there were many in my life.
Either in or out of time, the decision of a personal agency to commit an action happens antecedent to the action itself. Even if the deciding and the acting happened simultaneously, it would still not be true that the acting was antecedent to the deciding. Imagine God saying, "Oh, look! I just created a universe. Now I'd better decide to do it.
In most professions, if you stay at the office an extra four hours every day, you're gonna impress the boss. You're gonna get that promotion; you're gonna get that raise. You're gonna at least have job security. But with acting, if you're really ambitious and you have a good work ethic and are really good at your job, it might not really matter.
Gary Ross one of those directors which lets you do what you need to do to become your character - he lets you try to do everything on your own when you're acting. Then at some points he would say, "Let's try this," or "Let's try that." Most of the time he just kind of let me try to just become my character on my own and it worked out really well.
During the era when women were burning their bras - which, by the way, they never actually did - but when women were first becoming liberated, I was 23. And I met a woman who asked, 'Don't you feel bad because you're sort of acting like the stupid airhead blonde?' And I totally surprised myself. I said, 'Liberation can also come from the inside.'
I was a very determined kid. I couldn't imagine any other life for myself. This happens to kids who are different in any way. How am I going to make a life? Who am I going to be when I grow up? Will there be a place for me in the world? Acting gave me a sense of purpose, but it also gave me a sense that I would survive, that I would find my place.
It's obvious to say you can't please everybody and there are always going to be people who are going to say, I just don't like you. There's nothing I can do about that. I'm aware, probably much more aware than my harshest critic, of what my own problems are with my acting ability. I'm very, very critical of myself, and I don't ever want to not be.
What acting does bring that music doesn't bring for me is the opportunity is the opportunity to be completely different in every way from whom you normally are, the person that you are when you wake up in the morning is who you are in your life. But to take that and have the opportunity to be the complete opposite of that, is the excitement of it.
TV is longer form, and that's sometimes a positive, and sometimes a more challenging thing. As an actor, you want to be able to have your character develop or transform in some way. When you're acting on a show over the course of multiple seasons, you get to watch a character really grow and change, and go from one place to an entirely other place.
I was a barfly, so going to work and acting and rehearsing and then going and sitting in a bar and drinking and then going home was sort of my lifestyle. And there was none of that out here in the '70s when I was lucky enough to get movies, and nobody else that I knew was working in movies at that point. I didn't really have a lot of movie friends.
I've never been able to write for myself. I was doing a lot. I produced The Green, I wrote it - I didn't see myself in the world of this film. I'm sure there are elements of dark corners of my psyche that found their ways on screen; you didn't need my mug up there. There was enough of my essence in the story as it plays out without me acting in it.
I would say I like expressing myself in different ways. The way I can express myself in songs is awesome. What you can express through acting is cool too. I just want to let it all out. I like them both for different reasons, though. Music has a freedom that acting doesn't really have, and acting presents a challenge that music necessarily doesn't.
I know this might sound a little cliche but, I feel like everybody is searching for the same thing, and that is truth. I think that's sort of the journey to define that which is most inspirational. Even in acting, when I watch an actor who I find to be so truthful in their craft, or a musician who gets up there and sings so truthfully - I like that.
I love acting. I can't imagine anything else that I would do. I know a lot of actors that really want to be directors and be musicians and all that stuff. I like acting and I feel like I'm good at it. It kinda makes me happy. It's actually pretty easy to me and I can't imagine doing anything else at this point because I've been doing it for so long.
The hardest part of playing the villain was the prosthetics, because I couldn't really move my face as much as I wanted to, and yet I had to move my face a lot. If I moved my face in certain ways the prosthetics would come apart, so I could do a lot of eyebrow acting, but I couldn't do a lot of nose lifting, or the corners of the nose would pop out.
I was born in northeastern China, where we have the privilege to see forests just out of the window. And I thought, I am going to do something because I cannot imagine my hometown without forests, and I cannot imagine the earth turned into a desert. From that day on, environment protection weighs the same in my life as my professional acting career.
I think the performances that really communicate with me are the ones where I don't feel like I'm watching someone and thinking: "They're doing some really good acting." It's when I'm literally completely consumed by the story-telling and the actor or actress is evoking something in me. I think that's so powerful and cinema and TV has so much power.
We've all got a lot of catching up to do. I'm still learning how to act, for god's sake. When I see these old-timers on the Turner Classic Movies, I still get ideas, you know. That's where you really learn acting. If you really see some of these old boys working it and you say to yourself, "My God, if I could really do that that would be wonderful."
I never studied. I was too afraid. I thought that if an acting teacher had said to me, "You know what, you're not good," I would not have gone any further. It was easier for me to justify going to an audition and getting rejected, maybe because they wanted somebody blonde, maybe because I wasn't experienced enough. I could live with that more easily.
We will work in conjunction with the administration, passing legislation, repealing and replacing Obamacare. When that actually takes place, will take some time, and the administration will help determine how we phase one out and replace and phase in its replacement. The reason we`re acting now is because Obamacare is collapsing under its own weight.
To me acting is a hobby and I'm inspired by it. And if I'm going to spend time doing something that I'm not really inspired to do, then why am I doing it? I don't know if that sounds sort of new agey or whatever, but it's true. I've been lucky enough to have a musical career that has gone pretty good and acting is something I have always wanted to do.
I remember the first film I reviewed for the Daily was a John Ford Western. I think it was My Darling Clementine, but I am not certain. And I was just impressed by, first, the story itself. I didn't know that much about films. But the acting, the director. And particularly, the cinematography, the black-and-white use of exteriors, I noted particularly.
I do these things, as an actor, that I would have been oblivious to, if I hadn't studied acting. You start to understand the emotions and feelings, as close as you can get to them. That really helps. Acting literally saved my life. It helped me not become one of the statistics of all the military members taking their lives because of depression and PTSD.
It is proper for every one to consider, in the case of all men, that he who has not been a servant cannot become a praiseworthy master; and it is meet that we should plume ourselves rather on acting the part of a servant properly than that of the master, first, towards the laws, (for in this way we are servants of the gods), and next, towards our elders.
Know that when you seek anything of your own, you will never find God, because you do not seek God purely. You are seeking something along with God, and you are acting just as if you were to make a candle out of God in order to look for something with it. Once one finds the things one is looking for, one throws the candle away. This is what you are doing.
Acting requires focus, too, but acting doesn't, you might say, demand focus. When you're in the ring you don't even have to think about focus because the danger is so imminent. Imminent. You train and you prepare and then the adrenaline kicks in and drives you into focusing intensely. You'd better focus, right? Or else you'll make your exit on a stretcher.
I'm wearing three hats; I'm acting, producing, and directing. I was very involved in developing the script, too. But to me, that is very liberating. To me, the lower the budget, the more I want to be involved. I want to be more in control of my own destiny when there isn't much money involved, because you don't have the experts who can control your destiny.
Definitely, there's a lot of trouble you come up against when you're acting and directing, about your performance. Sometimes it's hard to be objective about it. I will tend to get two takes and walk away. I don't belabor it, and it's important to me to have someone who says, "You know what? You should get another one, and maybe you should try it like that".
Even though Donald Trump has won, even though Hillary Clinton has been vanquished, even though the left has suffered defeat after defeat after defeat, the Drive-By Media is still there, and they're still acting as they always do. They are setting the agenda. They are setting the narrative, establishing it, and they are determining what everybody talks about.
When I was a teenager, I thought I wanted to be an actor. I worked on an Indian soap opera that was my first exposure to production. But I quickly became disillusioned by acting and seeing that in the movies I loved and the TV I loved, no one looked like me. There weren't going to be any leading roles that would be interested in casting someone with my face.
In the theater, you're so much more in charge as an actor. For better or for worse, you know what the audience is seeing. But you can be acting your socks off on film, and then you see the movie, and the camera is on the other actor, or they've cut out the lines you thought were significant, or they've adjusted the plot. So much of it is out of your control.
Stay close to those who are not afraid to be vulnerable, because they have confidence in themselves and know that, at some point in our lives, we all stumble; they do not interpret this as a sign of weakness, but of humanity. Avoid those who talk a great deal before acting, those who never take a step without being quite sure that it will bring them respect.
...In little more than a single century from 1820 to 19450, no less than fifty-nine million human animals were killed in inter-group clashes of one sort or another.... We describe these killings as men behaving "like animals," but if we could find a wild animal that showed signs of acting this way, it would be more precise to describe it as behaving like men.
You can even say that I hated myself at certain periods. I was too fat, or maybe too tall, or maybe just plain too ugly ... you can say my definiteness stems from underlying feelings of insecurity and inferiority. I couldn't conquer these feelings by acting indecisive. I found the only way to get the better of them was by adopting a forceful, concentrated drive.
Part of our business is that you read interviews with these people and they don't really talk candidly about what's going on and the struggle - the struggle to do what you love and to maintain body image and to maintain this sort of false stature of who you're supposed to be as a role model and also who you are supposed to be to yourself personally and privately.
I'm an actor who loves to direct film, if I find something that I'm compelled to do and want to spend three or four years doing. I really love the process, though. I might have to just say, "Yeah, I want to direct that," because I want to direct something, but that's just not the way my being is. It's got to be a necessity for me, otherwise I'll just keep acting.
Why does anyone do anything? Belief. A belief that they are right and just in their actions. Abraham was willing to sacrifice his son, Isaac, because he believed that God had commanded it. To kill your son is unthinkable. A crime. But if you are acting in the belief that your God, your supreme deity whom you must obey, has demanded it of you, is it still a crime?
Any career if you're that passionate about it and you really want to do it, then you should go for it, absolutely. I will say acting is one of the hardest businesses, from what I've been told, even though it's the only business I've been doing my whole life. But knowing other people trying to break into it, I hear it's one of the hardest businesses to break into.