Quotes About Acting

People may know me from films, but theater is my first love. I did about 35 plays before I even landed my first screen role. I'm very comfortable on stage, and theater is not something you can just wing.

When I was in New York after I left the Army, I studied for two years at the American Theater Wing, studied acting, which involved dance and fencing and speech classes and history of theater, all that.

By the end of an intense four years at UCLA, I had co-authored a new math proof, which the media, in fact, loved. As it turned out, math itself blazed my entry back into the spotlight and consequently into wonderful acting jobs like 'The West Wing' and others. You just never know, do you?

Allison Janney's character in 'The West Wing' was so rocking! I am a huge fan of Mary Louis Parker and her character in 'Weeds.' My manager says, 'you have to grow into yourself, Allison' because all the characters I want to play are, like, 39.

It's nice to be thought of as attractive and all of that. On the other hand, it curtails you somewhat, too. They won't let me read for 'West Wing,' just to play, you know, a normal person. Or 'ER,' to play a doctor - the things I'm actually good at. I mean, I'm pretty good on foreign policy - they won't even let me come read for that.

I grew up in Bellport, Long Island where I attended Gateway Acting School and met Robin Allan. She was the school's director who took me under her wing and was the one who told me that I could do this for real.

It was a shock to my system leaving 'The West Wing' and going to 'Psych.' I remember being like, 'What are you doing?' when James Roday first started improvising. Steve and the writing staff write it that way. They leave gaps.

It's good for me to pull away from something that is just done for effect, which was basically Sue White in 'Green Wing.' In that, it was very much: if in trouble, gurn, or fall down. There was no character background to Sue. You didn't know who she was. She didn't have any toehold in any kind of reality.

When I started on 'The West Wing,' that was at a time when this was still a stigma, because movie stars didn't do TV. Now, every movie star is desperate to find their 'True Detective.'

I played sports. The acting thing was just a direct blessing from the Lord, because I lost my discipline to play sports, and I had this really cool professor grab me and kind of take me under his wing, and the ball just started rolling. Another professor introduced me to my first agent, and the next thing you know, I got to start doing films.

Who I always refer to as my acting mentor when I got into junior college is an acting professor by the name of Tom Blank. He took me under his wing, and he was that strong male figure. He was tough love, but he believed in me, saw everything that I had.

I started off when I was seven years old doing musicals. I was in 'Les Miserables' and 'The Sound of Music,' and my mum's an actress. My parents divorced when I was young, and when she couldn't find a babysitter, I was in the wings, sleeping.

I played a bee! It was a Polish fairy tale we performed at school when I was seven or eight. I had wings fixed to me.

I don't really mind not being a part of a film - because if there is no part for me, I will never force myself upon a film. I feel like it's just a distraction. If it is not organically incorporated into the story, it just feels like a stupid appearance, like a sort of wink. I hate that.

The way you can see what an actor brings to a role is you turn the sound off. Everything else becomes subtext, the wink and the nod, and the attitude and all that kind of stuff is a little easier to see with the sound off.

I broke into acting doing Latino roles. I played a Latino casanova in 'The Winner' and a Latino character on 'Hannah Montana.'

There's a competitive grief atmosphere in acting classes. Like, whoever has the biggest trauma is sort of like the winner of the day today or gets the A+. That, I could identify with from when I sort of dabbled with method acting classes when I was a teenager.

If one thing that bothers me about acting, it's that there's no clear-cut number one. The closest you can get is winning an Academy Award, and I'm going to work on that if it takes me the next 50 years. To my peers, it will mean that I'm the best!

Getting a role in 'Harry Potter' was like winning the lottery. But no one deserves an acting job.

I feel very competitive with Robert Morse off-set. We often duke it out. He always wins.

How do you say one actor is better than another actor? You can definitely say that in the Olympics if it's the same race and someone wins the race. The only way to really do it and have it be sincere would be if you get all the actors together, and they're all playing the same part, and then you rate which one made you feel the most.

I began with small roles in successful movies like 'No Country For Old Men' by the Coen brothers; but it was 'The Last Exorcism' that changed my life: with what I earned, I left Texas and moved to Los Angeles.

I grew up half the time in a small town called Mart, Texas, and half the time in L.A., because I was acting.

Working on 'King Of Texas' was a life experience for me.