The actor's life
"I love acting so much. It's such a free way for me to communicate. I feel fearless. Whereas in my life, I'm pretty much afraid all the time."
--Jennifer Jason Leigh
"It's really important to take care of your spirit, to have that thing that's yours no matter what. So that if you're not acting, you don't feel diminished. Pick a place to live where you're just happy to be, and know that what made you wrong for one role is exactly what will make you perfect for the next."
--Julie Briskman Hall
"I'm not going to lie, I like being famous. I like being well respected. I like that people don't laugh when they hear my name. I like being able to get tables at restaurants and discounts on clothes. My life is exactly the life that I wanted for myself."
--Christina Ricci
"Part of the acting life I love is the change, the absence of security, because, when you really look at life, you can't really count on anything."
--Beau Bridges
"When I start to suffer from [financial] insecurity, I tell myself, Hey, nobody told you to be an actor. If you want security go get a 9 to 5; you can have all the security you want."
--Marcia Gay Harden
"The balance of an artist is such a great one--keeping a thick skin so that these power merchants will not destroy you with what they say and do, and at the same time maintaining your sensitivity, because without your sensitivity you don't have your craft."
--John Spencer
"As actors we're at the mercy of circumstances and people outside ourselves. We're always dependent on a third eye, on people watching us, so it's easy to lose a sense of self. But when you go from character to character, role to role, that's just what you need: a strong sense of who you are."
--Gregory Wallace
"When I was 37, I had gone through a career as an English teacher. And I was just so dissatisfied with my life; I thought, So, is this gonna be it? And I thought, What did I ever do in my life that brought me real joy? I thought back to when I was young and acting and I thought, Well, I'm gonna try this before I get any older; I've got to give it a try so at least I can say that I tried."
--John Mahoney
"One of the traps we've tried to avoid is the presentation of ourselves as victims or beggars. Ruby and I have insisted that we have control over our lives and destinies. We've never tapped on the door, hat in hand, 'Please, please, take me.' We're going on our own power and our own steam, and when the time comes, we'll give each other our own Oscar and attend our own funerals, and screw the rest of it if necessary."
--Ossie Davis
on his and Ruby Dee's careers
"It's impossible to find the right theatre experience if what's happening in your home, the place where you go to get strength, is in chaos. Theatre is not going to fix you; you have to be solid first. You've got to make sure that you have a place that fills you, because acting will consistently take away from you as you get rejected year after year."
--Camryn Manheim
"I saw my mother in a cheerleader photo and thought, She should have been a star. So I decided to do it for her."
--John Epperson, a.k.a. Lypsinka
"I wanted to get as far away from gymnastics as possible. I didn't like to be judged constantly; the margin for error was so slim, and your whole self-worth was dependent on how you performed that day. So I picked show business! Now I have critics instead of judges. Thank God it's a team sport, you know?"
--Cathy Rigby
Old school
"I'm a disciple of experience. The tools that I got in my training from my teachers were just that--tools. Then I had to go out and learn to use them. That's what those years doing Los Angeles theatre were."
--Mark Ruffalo
"The moment an acting teacher starts to play therapist is the moment an actor should leave that class immediately. Therapy is a medical discipline. What does an acting teacher know about that?"
--Acting teacher Stephen Book
"You know, I'm embarrassed to say acting fascinates me. It's something that you can never get good at. You can never master it. The rules always change. It's a wonderful exercise."
--Willem Dafoe
"You are always a student of [acting]. There's no such thing as mastering a craft; it's just a question of continuing to work at it."
--Caroline Aaron
"Look, I'm a guy who could probably stand to have some acting lessons. But I always found that the pleasure and the satisfaction that you got from an acting class was deceiving, because you weren't really doing anything. You were feeling like you accomplished something, but in fact all you did was give somebody else your money and play around onstage."
--Jon Favreau
Career moves
"I've never read a part that I didn't want to play. I want to play them all."
--Laurie Metcalf
"My agents are lovely, and I really like them, but I know they're sometimes bewildered by my choices."
--Alan Cumming
"I think that if you take the parts that don't quite fit into what you think the career is going to be, that helps."
--Ned Beatty
"Stereotyping is partly your responsibility, because you say yes or no to certain projects, and if somebody keeps offering you 'Mob Guy No. 4,' you have to say no often enough to change their mind. It is your responsibility to diversify."
--Anthony LaPaglia
"My first cousin was very active in a theatre group in the Philippines. She told my mom about these auditions for The King and I because they needed a lot of children for the show. So I went in and sang 'Do Re Mi,' which was the only song I knew by heart, and I also recited my Girl Scouts oath."
--Lea Salonga
"I think some of the qualities that caused people in New York to say to me, 'Oh, forget it, you'll never do a thing, your accent is too strong, get back on the plane, go back to Texas'--those things that seem to many as a detriment became the things that got me the part in Badlands. That's another thing young actors need to remember early on: The most obvious things about them--the things they're probably going to be told to get rid of?could be the things that get them those early roles, particularly in film."
--Sissy Spacek
Cast away
"A casting session is like a party. It should be festive. You, the actor, are my invited guest. If you throw the lawn furniture into the pool, you don't get invited back. Remember, your goal is not to see every CD once, but to get invited back to these parties over and over again."
--Casting director Beverly Long
"I told a casting director over at Universal one time that she was rude as hell. I said, 'If you're going to stay on the fucking phone all day, then why don't you just do that and hire somebody else to see actors? Because I drove way over here in a $150 car. I don't have time for this kind of shit.'"
--Billy Bob Thornton
"I studied veterinary medicine at U.C. Davis, thinking I liked animals so much, and then I realized what I liked was meeting all of these people who brought their pets in. I'm a people person."
--CD Kevin Scott
"You hear, in pilot situations, that there's not enough talent to fit the need. I have a very difficult time with that. How can the statement that 'there's no talent' be made if you're only seeing a fraction of what's out there?"
--CD Jeanie Bacharach
"[Casting directors] just don't get that a woman gets better-looking the older she gets."
--Vivica A. Fox
"I won't keep people waiting. People keep actors waiting forever, and I don't believe you get a good audition when people are pissed off for having waited an hour."
--Commercial CD Danny Goldman
"Do not call me to ask who I am, what I do, what's my address, what I'm working on. If you don't know who, what, why, and where you're calling, I respectfully suggest you find another occupation. It shows me you haven't done your homework. If an actor is careless on introduction, then he will be careless in his work."
--CD Eddie Foy III
"If you're not getting better, you're getting worse.... You must work it every day."
--CD Donna Ekholdt
"Sit in the waiting room with blinders on. Don't look at your competition. There is no competition. Keep your eyes on the work at all times."
--20th Century Fox Executive VP
of Casting Donna Isaacson
"A good picture is your first priority. And don't let your lover or your mother pick the one they want on the mantle. Your headshot should say, 'I'm a very good actor' when I look at your eyes. Let us figure out what to do with your hair. Just look like you can act."
--CD Cathy Henderson
"It's not always what you do with a line. It's the wonderful stuff between the lines that writers can't write but actors can bring to it?the quiet background work."
--CD Patrick Baca
The wicked stage
"A solo turn on the stage that truly captivates an audience is like the dawn of theatre. They might as well be on a hillside in Macedonia, singing a ballad with a lyre. There's no more ancient and magically rooted storytelling tradition."
--Director David Schweizer
"To be in a room with a bunch of people when the lights go down, to articulate human experience, to reveal something to someone is an honor. We're kind of like priests, the channel to something. You always feel in the audience that there's somebody there who's hearing something that affects them. You can sense that."
--Nike Doukas
"We are the intimate theatre capital of the world. I mean, we have more than 200 small theatres; what city in the world can even come close to that? There isn't one. And there are really significant productions in Los Angeles in little tiny theatres where extremely professional, dedicated, heartfelt, enthusiastic people are putting their lives into creating an art they believe in, and often to very few people in the seats."
--The Victory Theatre's Tom Ormeny
The craft
"People say, 'What about character?' I say, 'There is no such thing as character. Let that come out of you and what the action of the film is.'"
--Anthony Hopkins
"The best film acting is when you're playing a scene and you're playing an objective, but you don't know exactly what you're going to do and you don't know what your face is going to do. The worst film acting is when you say, OK, when I say this line I'm going to lift my left eyebrow and pout."
--David Paymer
"There's a great justice in acting, in that you get what you give."
--Louise Lasser
"I believe the only person who can make a mistake in movies is the director. I don't believe there is such a thing as bad acting. I think there is only good acting and bad directing."
--Director Jordan Walker-Pearlman
"What takes actors out of character is fear. How can you act naturally as Willy Loman if you're afraid you're going to dislocate your son's jaw?"
--Richard Lane, director of San Francisco's Academy of the Sword
"While I'm creating a portrait of that character, I am the custodian of that character. You walk into any painter's studio, and if he is painting a portrait of somebody, that somebody is under the care of the artist whilst the artist is creating that portrait. The artist is interpreting that person on canvas and that person is in the hands of that artist."
--Ben Kingsley
"There is no such thing as a non-actor. All humans 'act.' Seldom are we in touch with the truth. Trained actors learn tricks, things to give ideas of character."
--Robert Viharo
Ego check
"I did something that no brown-skinned man in the movie industry ever did. I made a brown-skinned man look very romantic--a matinee idol. If you think about it, what I introduced is historical, because it had never happened before, and it hasn't happened since--not on that level."
?Billy Dee Williams
"Then I came to the realization that I'm a god! I can say whatever I want."
--Jonathan Haugen
on playing Apollo
"[Industrials] can be kind of awkward. But the first time you do Greek theatre it feels pretty awkward, too. Standing up there saying, 'I am Poseidon, god of water,' feels about as comfortable as saying, 'I love market caps' or something like that. Actors adapt."
--Jesse Dienstag
True or false
"As far as misrepresentation goes, as far as kickbacks go, let's not be anal in this area. I mean, this is Hollywood."
--Talent manager Christopher Valentino, who ultimately received a jail sentence for swindling actors
"If you're a rat bastard, you gotta find your inner rat bastard and let it rat around, instead of saying, I'm a rat bastard, but really feel sorry for me."
--Dennis Christopher
on committing to a character
"I have brave actors as parents. You know, when you're raised by the guy who killed John Wayne, there's not much more bad you could do in a movie. Both my parents have been willing to be all of it--as dark, as disturbed, as human, and as devastating as possible."
?Laura Dern on her parents, Bruce Dern and Diane Ladd
"I don't let people get in my ear and tell me what's marketable. I put on stage the truth. I think for writers in particular, they shouldn't worry about writing what people say will 'sell' in Hollwood. Write your truth."
--Playwright David E. Talbert
Who's laughing?
"We have a tendency to under-estimate comedy simply because it makes you laugh, and so everyone always thinks it's so easy. Comedy, for me, is the highest art form. It's taking intrinsically sad things and putting a new twist of them that makes us enjoy them and laugh at them."
--Monty Python's Terry Jones
"I had my pants off more often when I was starting. If nothing was happening onstage, my pants would come down."
--Colin Mochrie on doing improv
"The reason I'm still interested in improvisation after all these years is because I don't know how to do it. If you know how to do it, don't do it! Where's the fun? If you're full of fear, you can't do it. Trying and failing, but not being miserable about failing, that's what it's about. If you're not failing, you're not learning."
--Improv guru Keith Johnstone
"The main reason I have a technique is to stop the analytical trappings of the mind, where I'm starting to worry about, Is this funny? Quiet the mind. This is the same thing the Dalai Lama has to do every morning. He wakes up and goes, Should I wear the maroon... or not? He's got to quiet his mind."
--Comedy teacher Chris Barnes
Union jack
"As a union, you cannot enforce laws based on celebrity, and the punishment must be uniform. I suggest in this time of healing that we accept all of the actors' apologies, attach fines appropriately and fairly, and let people go about the business of chasing their dreams. This union was created not to protect the famous but to protect the struggling actor, even if that means from themselves."
--George Clooney
on SAG's selective punishment of union actors who did scab work during the commercial strike
"I'm really amazed that it came down this way. It has been a nerve-racking evening, and I wasn't expecting to win by such a large margin. It was a nail-biter."
--Melissa Gilbert
on winning the SAG Presidency by 1,588 votes
"This isn't about a recount, and it has nothing to do with my race with Melissa. But I want to make sure that the [Guild's] constitution isn't eroded and that we obey our own rules. It is time for me to take a stand."
--Candidate Valerie Harper on the demand for an investigation into alleged voting irregularities
Advice squad
"Don't believe that, to work, somebody else has to give you a job. Hire yourself."
--Nicole Ari Parker
"Don't be snowed into thinking that people who make movies have some sort of secret ingredient that you are not aware of. Take charge, write a script, and shoot it yourself. Don't wait for the break. Create the break."
--Director Kevin Smith
"Theatre does a lot of things for people that actors don't even realize. Take out of the equation whether you're going to be seen. Ask yourself, 'Am I an actor?' If the answer is yes, then theatre needs to be included in your life."
--CD Judy Belshe
"A lot of people think you have to be perfect in your headshot to get called in [by casting directors], and it's not about that. It's about having a good connection though the photograph and having the photograph say something about you. It doesn't matter if you're overweight or underweight, whether you have great skin or just OK skin. If you look at the cross-section of actors, they aren't all beautiful, perfect-skinned people."
--Photographer Paul Katami
"Work as much as you can, wherever you can, in whatever you can."
--Don Cheadle