Quotes About Acting

I can do comedy, so people want me to do that, but the other side of comedy is depression. Deep, deep depression is the flip side of comedy. Casting agents don't realize it but in order to be funny you have to have that other side.

I've done a lot of serious roles, but they're, like, independent, so it's harder for them to come out. The big ones have been comedies, but I would love to get a big drama to let people see the other side of me, that I am a serious actress.

It's not like I'm looking for things that I can direct that I can also act in, but when it's right, I feel like the actor side of me wants to have that opportunity.

I wasn't, like, pretty enough to be the ingenue; I wasn't 'character' enough to be the goofball sidekick. I'm kind of ethnically ambiguous.

I want to play a character that is cold. I think there are sides of me that are like that. I'm a fan of the actor Edward Norton, and if you see his early works, he plays a lot of those roles.

All of us have a lot of sides to ourselves, but the fun thing about being actor is you make one side predominant for the character you're playing.

I get to act out two roles on 'The Legend of the Blue Sea,' including one as a con man, and so I'll be able to show many diverse sides to me.

Every actor will tell you it's so much more fun to play the bad guy because usually those characters are more complex and more broad and more interesting, and have more sides to them.

That's the joy of acting - you get to play people who are not you; you get to explore the dark, hidden sides of yourself.

The acting part of me is not me. The music side is who I really am and what I want to talk about. It'll be hard for people to differentiate those different sides but I think it's possible. Once the music is out there, people will start to realize how serious I am about it rather than, 'Oh god, another actress making an album.'

That's the joy of getting to be an actor - getting to play all kinds of different roles and showing so many different sides of yourself.

Improv definitely made me a better auditioner, without a doubt. We did do an audition semester in grad school, and that was helpful for those times that you have a script and you have a few days to prepare it, to really work on sides. But the auditions I was doing in New York, if you got it the night before, you were very lucky.

Julia Roberts most definitely would play me in the film of my life. Not just because of the hair but because she has all sides to her personality come through in films that I could just imagine her playing my crazy self so well.

My father was an actor, and my mother was his agent, so I had it on both sides: the crazy actor and his representation.

Being on 'The Office' prepared me for drama. Comedy got me ready, but once you get down to it, they're two sides of the same thing. I mean, the delivery has to be different - in drama, there's more time to breathe, and comedy's all about hitting the joke.

My ideal would be to hop both sides of the Atlantic to work, as I'm sure every actor would.

I had to always decide - am I playing Will in the scene, or is it the monster, or is it a little bit of both? I had to show two different sides of one person in a scene. They were definitely very opposites, because Will is this sweet little innocent sort of kid, and the monster is fierce; he's intense. You really have to show both sides.

He didn't maintain my illusion of myself, he gave me an illusion of myself. Before I met him, I never thought of myself as an actress. Boy, he sidetracked me in a great way!

My father died in 1989 before I knew what I was going to do with my life. I had just graduated from college. My mother died just before 'Sideways' came out. She knew I was an actor, but she never saw me become successful.

I started acting when I was at Amherst my junior year, and my lacrosse career kind of started to flop sideways after that.

My sights have always been on acting, on the creative process, never the lifestyle. Growing up in Northern Ireland when I did, everything was against you if you wanted to do something like that. But I was determined.

I don't feel like a celebrity. I did not sign 'Udta Punjab' to increase my fan following.

I was cast in 'Thor' and I'm cast as a Nordic god. If you know anything about the Nords, they don't look like me but there you go. I think that's a sign of the times for the future. I think we will see multi-level casting. I think we will see that, and I think that's good.

Today, I guess I give a lot more thought to the roles before I sign them.