Quotes About Actor

Im an actor, full stop. Not an Arab actor. Not an actor of Algerian origin. Just an actor.

I wouldn't be an actor if it weren't for the English teacher I had my junior year in high school. She's the one who told me I could be an actor. I had never met an actor, I had never seen a real play, only high school plays. I didn't know actors were real, that it was a real job.

I always thought the leading actor should be the best supporting actor, because you're the only person that can help every other actor on the set.

Do you want to be an actor, or do you want to be a celebrity? I made that decision when I went to Juilliard. I wanted to be an actor. So, if I get the opportunity to be an actor and do some cool, fun and interesting projects, I’m going to do that.

[Ed Lauter] was an actor's actor. I love working with that class of actor. You know, they come in, they do it, no bullshit. There's no artifice, there's no fanciness, they're just honest and tough and direct.

I actually cut my sentences a lot. I'm very aware of the actor, giving them too many words - just a mouthful of words - it's difficult sometimes for an actor. So I'm kind of aware of breaking sometimes the line, the sentence with a comma where maybe there wouldn't be a comma there. Just to give a breathing space for the actor, just to be aware of that.

Harrison Ford is a great actor and he's and lovely man and a great father and all of these things, I got to just meet him as a person and someone I respect as an actor.I'd never seen any 'Indiana Jones' movies or 'Star Wars' movies. My husband made me watch the Indiana Jones trilogy, I just was like fanboy Comic-Con geeked out. It was amazing I didn't show up to set with a whip and a hat.

I write in order to understand the images. Being what my agent . . . somewhat ruefully calls a language playwright, is problematic because in production, you have to make the language lift off the page. But a good actor can turn it into human speech. I err sometimes toward having such a compound of images that if an actor lands heavily on each one, you never pull through to a larger idea. That's a problem for the audience. But I come to playwriting from the visual world - I used to be a painter. I also really love novels and that use of language. But it's tricky to ask that of the theatre.

I'm a comedic actor, not to mix words, but it's something I think about. A comedic actor. I like to think that Christopher Guest, Phil Hartman, Peter Sellers and Alec Guinness are comedic actors. And Dan Aykroyd, too. Those are my heroes.

And my father, being a good Swiss puritan, always really insisted that if I was going to be an actor, I shouldn't just be an actor, I should know about the whole process.

I had a teacher in Paris, who said that if an actor forgot what it's like to play as a child he shouldn't be an actor. I've always loved being with children. It's marvellous to see the fresh ways they see the world. Watching them look at a tree or a river helps you to understand something that's very important.

I'm not a method actor, but I'm a big research kind of actor.

To me, the responsibility of an actor is to recreate humanity honestly. I never feel like an actor, I always look at it from a blue collar perspective.

First of all, it was wonderful to have a home. Consistent work when you're a journeyman actor, when you're a character actor, is really hard to come by. When you can get it, you have to cherish every moment of it - cherish the crew, cherish the cast, cherish the stage, cherish everything. Because when it's over, it's really hard to get back.

The good thing about being an actor, and the gift of being an actor, is that you are beautifully forced to see the world with different eyes.

I got out of college and I went to get my master's in creative writing at San Francisco State. I was working as an actor at the Actor's Workshop, being abused as a intern.

The challenge for me as an actor is if you become a celebrity, you don't meet strangers anymore. And strangers are where we have our anonymity. And I believe it's essential for the soul to be anonymous, especially if you're going to be an actor.

My experience as a young actor on network television was that I couldn't make it work. I was drowning as an actor.

An improv artist's best instrument is their ability keep their antennae clean so they're able to receive what I call the connection to creativity. It's the thing that you see in any amazing moment that any human being is performing. Whether it's watching Michael Jordan navigating through all these attackers and then suddenly rising up and putting the ball in the most amazing way, or watching an actor on stage playing Shakespeare, but not thinking about the actor anymore or the stage or you or the chair, any of these kinds of moments of transcendence.

TV acting is so extremely intimate, because of the peculiar involvement of the viewer with the completion or "closing" of the TV image, that the actor must achieve a great degree of spontaneous casualness that would be irrelevant in movie and lost on the stage. For the audience participates in the inner life of the TV actor as fully as in the outer life of the movie star. Technically, TV tends to be a close-up medium. The close-up that in the movie is used for shock is, on TV, a quite casual thing.

Some people manage to make that transition from child actor to adult actor seamlessly. But I felt that if I spent my whole life on a film set without taking a few years to do something else, all I would ever know about was film sets.

You know, be an actor because you love to act. Don't be an actor because you think you're going to get famous, because that's luck.

Interest in religion is not necessarily interest in God. Religion in public life means a set of ideas, an ideology that has certain positions. Religion is then one more ideology among others. Religion is about God. Religion begins with a relationship to God, not a relationship to an idea. It is God who is an actor, not just individuals who have certain beliefs who are actors. God is an actor.

Sometimes you'll see interviews about an actor who was asked to hit the weight room to develop his body for the character, and you hear them complaining about the egg white omelettes they had to eat and the tortures of hitting the gym twice a day - I find that to be a bit saddening, it's all a part of becoming the character and as an actor, that is your job.

When I started writing after my career as an actor, I knew that that other life in the film industry would be pulled into my writing life and that people would see me not as an author but as an actor starting to write.

If you put anger in the writing, then it's like an actor crying on stage. The audience will not cry with the actor and in some way inure itself against the emotion.

I played guitar. I've always considered myself an actor, but I wasn't making a living as an actor. So I was in a couple of folk groups that managed to keep me in underwear and burritos.

I think, when people so strongly associate an actor with a character they play - but the main feeling is I feel very happy that I've been able to play somebody that people connect so strongly to. That's overall a very good feeling. There's the sweet and the sour, I guess. It does sting a little bit. Your insecurity as an actor maybe seeps in, but ultimately I think it's a very lovely thing. It doesn't happen that often. It's mostly good, I'm fine with it.

People say to me, 'Oh, being a mother must make you a better actor,' and I think, 'Well, I never sleep, I have very little time to think about anything except when I'm actually there.' I wonder whether that makes me a better actor. I think it must on some level.

I never wanted to be an actor. I never want to be an actor. I want to be a movie star. The whole idea of having to act is too gruesome. It's too ambitious for me.

I want to cast correctly, and then I want them to live on screen. If I cast the wrong actor, I'm screwed. But, if I cast the right actor, it really works out. The casting process is so important.

My tendency as an actor was to correct people, was to say, 'What if we tried it this way, what about if we tried that way?' That's terrible habit for an actor, but that's a good habit for director. So I became a director.

If you're a leading actor you don't work with another actor. You work with a lady.

I wanted to be an actor. I decided when I was very young, when I first saw movies, that I wanted to be an actor.

I'm not necessarily a good actor, but once people start saying you are, you are. And I know that that's a truism, and there's obviously nothing important in that particular statement, but it's really about the fact that people create you as a good actor.

Someone I met years ago explained to me the difference between a personality and an actor, a personality being Eddie Murphy or Roseanne Barr, and an actor being Morgan Freeman and Alfre Woodard or Marlon Brando.

I fell in love with film. I didn't start out to be a film actor. I wanted to be a theater actor.

Look, I'm not odd. I'm just trying to be an actor; not a movie star, an actor.

I grew up, especially as an actor thinking that I had to move to New York to be a good actor. But after a while you start to live the world a little bit and you start to appreciate where you're from.

With every action oriented or adventure film, there's going to be a moment when every actor becomes a stuntman and every stuntman becomes an actor. You try to do as much of it as you can, but inevitably the studio wants you to finish the movie. So you've got to slow down and you're really got to defer to your team to make sure you do.

There is no more reason for a room on a stage to be a reproduction of an actual room than for an actor who plays the part of Napoleon to be Napoleon, or for an actor who plays Death in the old morality play to be dead.

My dad didn't often bring me to the set, being an actor himself, so my infancy as an actor was wracked with a lot of giggles and nervousness.

An actor will use every piece of information at their disposal, or a good actor will.

I'm so blessed to have been a working actor. If they still would like to make me a superstar, I'm available, but so far, being a working actor has been great. It's taken me everywhere.

There's something really natural to me about being what they call in the business a "hyphenate." Being a musician-actor or writer-musician-actor.

I'm not an actor. I can show up for friends and improvise a little bit, but I'm not an actor.

Only a great actor finds the difficulties of the actor's art infinite.

We [black actors] are more respected in Europe, because in Europe, I'm not a black actor - I'm an action star. In America, I'm a black actor.