Quotes About Acting

I had a hard time treating my field as if it's horse racing, putting actors in competition against each other. I see how the industry and the studios feel it's important, but I don't really have a feeling for being in competition. I want to feel sympathetic and close to others, not opposed to them.

I've worked with actors who treat the first two takes like rehearsals. And that's okay. If the camera is on you and we're doing a scene where I'm off camera, I'm treating that as a rehearsal.

It's fun finding your way to the performance instead of coming in and hoping to God you're impressing the director - and hoping you're delivering the lines right with no treatment beforehand.

I'm sort of a reverse Method actor. In my personal life, I become my characters. After 'One Tree Hill', I started dressing in Converse and ripped jeans and hoodies. On 'Awkward', it manifests in how I speak.

My first real kiss came when I was 10, and it was in an acting class. I had to do a scene from a movie where someone gets kissed under a tree, and I did not want to do it! But my acting partner wanted me to feel comfortable, so he bought a picnic basket with all these snacks. He made such an effort - and it was cute.

'One Tree Hill' gave me my first shot into acting, and they gave me the biggest chance, and that's something that I'll always respect and be grateful for.

In L.A., I was meeting people who were all actors. My mind started to open up to what acting was. I didn't realize that Brad Pitt was a real person. I didn't think he was a robot or a machine, but I thought you were just born into acting - that it's a family tree, kind of like NASCAR. No one can just say, 'Hey, I'm going to be a NASCAR driver.'

I think of myself as an actor. The duty of an actor is to be able to impersonate anything - a child, an old man, a tree, a chair, a woman.

How do you find a better actor than Michael McKean? How do you find someone who's just that good? They don't grow on trees. Plus, he's a pleasure to work with, pleasure to be around.

As a child, one of my defense mechanisms was to try to be funny. My mom tried to nurture that by putting me in acting class. But I got bored when we stopped pretending to be trees and actually had to work.

I am somebody who is not too fond of fancy or commercial stuff, like dancing around trees. Even in the 20 films I have done in South, none had any of such stuff.

You will never see me dancing around the trees, chasing a heroine; I will never do films, no matter what the budget, for the heck of it.

Bubbly roles and running around trees don't satiate an actor's quest for the best.

I love running around trees as much as a serious role.

If you're looking at my other major science fiction roles - the Doctor on 'Star Trek' and certainly Woolsey on 'Stargate' - I often play characters that might be good theorists and good thinkers, but you wouldn't call either of them very macho characters.

Up until the time I was cast in 'Star Trek,' the roles were pretty shallow - thin, stereotyped, one-dimensional roles. I knew this character was a breakthrough role, certainly for me as an individual actor but also for the image of an Asian character: no accent, a member of the elite leadership team.

When I came out to L. A., I got a part in an episode of 'Star Trek: Voyager,' and I hired an acting coach.

I think many actresses want to be famous and want to be the prettiest, and that wasn't my trek. I was thinking, 'I gotta get out of here... how do I get out of here?' I like acting, but I like directing more.

You play a hologram on 'Star Trek,' and you have to spew line after line. I spoke in paragraphs on 'Star Trek.'

'Star Trek' came along fairly early. And I don't know what they saw in me that said Captain Kruge, because I hadn't done anything remotely like that, but it worked out.

The key to my perseverance was absolutely loving the craft of acting. I just figured that if I kept doing it, at the very least I would get better at acting. Even if I didn't become a tremendous success, as long as I knew I was improving and getting better, to me, that was success.

I specifically remember doing the musical 'Sweet Charity' at Stagedoor. I was playing Vittorio Vidal, which is a very funny part, and some other small roles. I couldn't really sing that well, but there were so many fun bits, and I just remember the tremendous adrenaline rush I felt from being onstage and hearing the audience enjoying it.

Broadway was always sort of my trajectory before I found film and television - that would be really tremendous.

What happens on 'Mad Men' in terms of the acting and the writing and the directing, it's superior. And yes, it has tremendous cache and buzz because it's become iconic, but it also deserves all the kudos and the awards as well, because it's a beautiful show to look at.