Quotes About Acting

I grew up poor, financially lower class. Worked in restaurants for 17 years while going to acting school and trying to become a working actor. Because I know what it's like to not have money, I turn down roles if I don't want to play them.

I have friends who are movie stars, and I think it's just as hard a job as being a working actor. But it's a different job, and it's not the one I want.

I consider myself a fortunate working actor, but I really work at it all the time. If I have a couple of weeks off, I'm taking class. You never stop. I started when I was 10 years old in Cleveland, and I've never stopped working my butt off.

At some point, you're just happy to be a working actor, but to be able to do it with people you really love and enjoy spending time with, it's just such a rare thing. You hear so many horror stories.

My whole thing is I just always wanted to be a working actor and I just wanted to stop waiting tables.

'Wings' offered me the rare opportunity to be a full-time dad and a working actor for eight years.

I started acting, when I was 15, in commercials and guest roles. I was definitely a working actor, so I was thankful for that. But I never had to work at a store, although I would have liked to.

So as long as I'm a working actor, I can improve. I want to work with people that frighten me and excite me, and characters that I don't believe I'm the best person for the part but I'm still gonna try anyway. Those are my favorite roles.

I've always been in school plays and performing monologues and taking drama. Now I'm in acting classes. I do it the real way. I want to be a working actor. I would love that. I just like being on a series and having a script, and I want that to be my nine-to-five.

I don't know so much about making it, because I think of myself as a working actor who's always got my eye on what's going to be the next job. I've been acting for 22 years, and I think there's something to be said for simply staying in the game.

It's not like suddenly, when you become a working actor all your friends are in the same situation. I have friends who are still handing out flyers for their one-woman show and trying to make ends meet.

My parents didn't want me to be a regular in a series. I was a working actor from time to time but they thought was a little too much being a star of a series. They wanted me to have a slightly more normal childhood.

I'm trying to be a working actor. I'm not in pursuit of fame. I'm not trying to be in the kinds of films that make you famous like that.

I did a theater program the summer of my junior year, and that's when I really fell in love with the craft of acting. It became more about the craft and less about being a working actor.

I'd rather be a working actor and not hiding anything in my personal life.

For my first role, I had to audition five times. I've gotten a lot of no's and rejections. But I just had to keep working hard. I took classes; I worked on my craft and continued to work with an acting coach and just didn't give up on myself.

One of the things that I found very confronting in my early working life was that people thought I was some sensitive doe-eyed lovelorn boy, because they'd seen me do that a couple of times. What tends to happen is you get a run of similar roles.

I think good acting results when working together in a comfortable environment.

I work with a group of actors, and whenever one of us has an audition, we all get together, and we all work together on it. I think it takes us back to our film school days, our drama school days, us just working together and figuring it out because somebody else is going to see something in the material that you won't see.

The first time Rachie and I will be working together is on an episode of 'Doctor Who' specially written for us by Mark Gatiss. How lucky is that?

My sister is a very good actress and when we are working together, we become our characters. We are not sisters then.

It's like, sometimes I'll watch a movie, and it's got some big star in it playing a working-class person, and the character is in a grocery store, and you can kind of tell, from just watching the scene, that this actor doesn't do their own shopping. So you have to have some sense of reality.

When I first left drama school, I was too posh for the working-class parts and not posh enough for the upper-class roles. You know what England is like: the gradations of accent and how you're judged by them are still there. I discovered that to get a break you have to lie about where you're from.

I'm from a working-class family. We didn't have a lot, but we had the arts. You're talking to a guy who is making a living at doing what he loves doing - acting, singing and dancing. So any career ups and downs were not that significant to me; the only things that really powerfully impinged on me were my losses, and there were many in my life.