Quotes About Actors

I have to audition for everything; there is no Mrs. Robbie Williams free pass, and because I'm working with British actors everyone is so polite - no one mentions Robbie.

The trailblazers are my role models in this industry: Sidney Poitier, Harry Belafonte, James Earl Jones, and Billy Dee Williams. I keep their pictures in my trailer and try to measure to their standards every time I act.

I've learned more and more on each show that I've done. I've been blessed and I've gotten to work with some very talented actors - James Gandolfini, Treat Williams. I've kind of always asked for advice and tried to take in as much as I could whenever working with them.

It took Cianfrance 12 years to bring 'Blue Valentine' to the screen after he first conceived it. He found Gosling and Williams early on, and they hung in there with him. The film finally premiered at Sundance 2010, then screened at Cannes and the Toronto Film Festival before landing in theaters in December.

I was an understudy in a show called 'One Over The Eight' with Kenneth Williams and Sheila Hancock.

I run Willow Management, which is the biggest agency for other short actors. We look after performers who are either under five feet and over seven feet tall.

Patrick Wilson and Rose Byrne made very good money from both 'Insidious' movies. Word travels fast, so as soon as you have a success and do what you say you're going to do in a contract and pay out that money, we had a lot more established actors come to us and say they want to work with us.

Somewhere in the '60s, actors became wimps and basket-case psychotics.

I've always looked at famous actors and hope that once they get a part that they have success in, they would reprise it every few years in the way a pop singer will reprise their hits. Like Bob Dylan singing 'Blowin' in the Wind' until he's fed up with it, finding different ways of doing it.

Some people do stage and film. Some people are film actors, and some people are stage actors. I'm quite sure that any of the actors who did the original production of 'August' could have done the film of 'August.' I don't think any of them were particularly surprised when they didn't wind up doing the film.

Before there were stages we worked on raised platforms with cheesecloth overhead to diffuse the bright sunlight. The reason they built stages for silents was to get out of the wind.

Anytime you cast a movie and you need someone famous in the lead part, you're a prisoner of whoever happens to be famous in the six-month window in which you're trying to get a film financed.

If you look at the exports, Sasha Baron Cohen, Simon Pegg, Ricky Gervais, all these actors are comedians arent they? But they seem to be excelling in the dramatic world as much as the comedy world, so I think the days of people saying if youre a comedian, you wont get drama I think thats all out of the window now.

'Philistines' was so beautiful, and it bored me to death. I never want to see another production where the rain splashes against a window and actors wander around in drab cardigans saying, 'I'm so bored.'

When actors are the real deal, all that star whatever goes right out the window and you're there to tell a story.

For me, you have to do as much work as you can beforehand and, once you get on stage or set, throw it out the window because you need to be collaborative. You shouldn't have too many ideas about where it goes before you get into the room with the director and other actors.

It's hard for two actors to be together. Take the traveling, for instance. It winds up being a long distance relationship, all the time, because one's working here and one's working there, or one's staying at home and one's off someplace else.

At 'The West Wing,' I cast newscasters, and when you put out a casting call for actors, half of the people who come in are real local L.A. newscasters. Each time, I ended up hiring one of them, because they're better at it. Big surprise! A newscaster is better at playing a newscaster than an actor is.

Waiters are like actors waiting in the wings, bantering whenever we passed each other on the restaurant floor, shouting at each other backstage in the kitchen and winking and corpsing above the heads of our audience, the unsuspecting customers.

I guess winning an Oscar is the ultimate dream. A lot of amazing actors go their whole career without even being nominated. So that would definitely be a goal to reach. It's a difficult one, but I'm aiming for it!

So I think that in the beginning of your career you're just looking to work. Luckily for me, my first movie was 'Rabbit Hole' and I got to work with incredible people, a Pulitzer prize winning writer, John Cameron Mitchell, and all the actors involved. So it's tough, man, because you want to have credibility.

There are so many people who come to me to be an actor, but I select only those people who I feel can fit my script. If they do, I immediately say yes. I don't do screen tests. I talk to them and see how their mind functions. I read their mind and cast them.

I was born in Dallas; then I moved to Allen, Texas. But then I got sent to boarding school, where I started to get fascinated with actors like Al Pacino.

We all have an obligation as actors to be true to ourselves and our best instincts, but often there's a higher purpose, which is to serve the text and, in the grander sense, serve the series, even if that means to fall on your sword and take the hit.