Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Drama school taught me not to be precious.
Everyone at drama school called me Musical Boy.
Even at drama school if there was a part of some eastern European thug it would be me.
Drama school was a lifeline for me, it saved me. I found it very nurturing - I just clung on.
I have been out of drama school for 13 years, so there are 13 years' worth of graduates behind me.
I hadn't been to drama school. I hadn't been to university and acted there. I had no qualifications behind me.
If I had gone to drama school, I wouldn't be sitting here now because it would have blanded me out; it would have just turned me into another actor.
After 'American Idol,' I got a lot of 'stuck up' rumors that just fueled the never-ending flames of high school drama. Thankfully, my real friends always stood up for me and knew I wasn't like that.
Part of the creative journey for me was not to come up the conventional route. I didn't go through drama school. I chose not to. I came from a very working-class area, a child of Nigerian immigrants.
You know how there's always the one girl in drama school who can cry at the drop of a hat? She has that emotional well she can tap into in a second? I'm not that girl. It takes a lot to get me to that place.
I applied to drama school when I was about 18 and didn't have any luck anywhere. They basically turned me away and said I had a bit of growing up to do. I went back to Aberystwyth and did my growing up by spending eight months working in Peacocks.
Most actors here go to the West Coast; I ended up going to Ireland. My buddies who left drama school, they had this arrogance - 'We don't want to typecast ourselves.' But I said, 'I want to do Irish parts. That's the thing that's gonna give me the leg up.'
For me, it's all I've wanted to do. I did local plays and productions, local theater groups and anything that involved it. And then, I went and studied it, attended drama school and got my first lucky break in the theater in London, and just went from there.
At 13, in my first year of Tonbridge, I went up for the part of Macbeth. I was up against the 17- and 18-year-olds, but for some reason I got the part. It made me incredibly unpopular with my peers, but it was the English and drama teachers who stepped in to save me when others wanted me kicked out of the school.
I drifted into acting. My grandfather had a house in Buffalo in which there was a stage, and his friends met every two weeks or so to put on plays. So it was natural for me to put on plays, too, when I went to boarding school. I put on everything in the drama - I was indiscriminate. I put on Yeats and Shaw and Lady Gregory.