Quotes About Persona

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.

As a performer, you get your 'thing.' You're the deadpan comedian, or the mad one, or the sexy one, and then you rely on that and mine that seam for years and years and you kind of forget who you were. There's this mask that you hold up between you and the audience that means they never get to see who you really are.

When people think of me, they think about me knocking catchers down and knocking second basemen down and yelling at pitchers. But when I took the spikes off after the game, I was a nice guy when I went home.

There was a lot of work that people don't know about that I did to establish my villain persona. There were a lot of miles on the road that went into it, thousands upon thousands of hours of writing on yellow pads while driving in my car with the dome light on.

When we go somewhere in New York, I'm known as Mr. Savini.

If you can't play the good guy, sometimes you've got to play the villain.

I was trained as an actor and taught to believe at a very young age that I could be anything and do anything, and then you find yourself painted into a corner by your own image or persona.

We're into Nicole Kidmans, rather than the young girl who just got married in a tracksuit.

If you change and adapt your persona, you are seen as inauthentic; if you stay the angry young man, you fade from attention or seem tiresome.

One trap you can fall into when playing someone iconic is to end up doing everything in an iconic way, no matter how pedestrian or mundane that thing is.

If you get trapped in the idea that what is most important is what image of yourself you're giving to the world, you're on a dangerous path.

There is a blueprint that young female singers seem to follow to make it, to make some noise when they first come out. And it's a hyper-sexualized persona. And the thing is that it works. And they do make noise. But the problem is if it's not authentic to you, then you're trapped in that persona. And you have to live that persona 24/7.

I am an actor who doesn't believe in carrying an 'image' in the industry. I don't want to get trapped in an image.

I think some superstars feel they get trapped in their established screen persona over and over again. That's what they get hired to do.

I am an old comic trapped in young comic's body.

I'm a leading man trapped in a bad guy's body.

Drag is about whatever persona you put on to do a particular task. I could pick up trash in the morning and throw on my navy blue jumpsuit, and that would be that gig!

You need the trash talk, and I'm an entertainer. I don't care if I look positive or not.

If you're playing your character and you're running into all these people who know who you are and treat you in a way that doesn't pertain at all to the character, it takes you out of it more, so when you're alone in a city where people don't know you, you can kind of pretend even more and get into the head space of where you need to be.

I began to fear that Mos Def was being treated as a product, not a person, so I've been going by Yasiin since '99. At first it was just for friends and family, but now I'm declaring it openly.

When wearing a trench coat, you're allowed to act like Humphrey Bogart when he was detective Sam Spade.

I never thought of clothes as having a life of their own -but they do. We all wear an outer layer to hide who we really are.

I'm Valentino Rossi. And I want to be a person, not an icon.

My real name's McGill. The Jew thing I just do for the homeboys. They all want a pipe-hitting member of the tribe, so to speak.