Quotes About Acting

The thing is, even if you're playing sort of a heightened character and playing inside sort of a heightened reality, you can still apply your own truths to those characters.

I take the sexy girl parts and try to give them something else and make them a character.

I think, at the end of the day, acting and activism are both about empathy. You're trying to get people to see other people as real and human. And to care.

I curl up inside and freeze when I have to act. I much prefer sitting on the sidelines and trying to get the best out of other people.

Sitcoms always made the most sense to me. I grew up watching them every day with my dad. Every Monday, Tuesday night, we would be sitting in front of the television watching any kind of sitcom. I connect with that more, but I love to do whatever kind of role.

I knew I can teach physics well, so earning money from tuition was no struggle. The struggle was to earn money through acting.

Acting was always something fun to do on the side growing up, but I never really took it seriously. I would do a commercial every few months, and that paid my school tuition. But in high school, I was mostly into sports and didn't go out for stuff during those seasons.

I don't know why I chose to make my debut with 'Dil Maange More.' The film had three leading ladies - Tulip Joshi, Ayesha Takia and me - opposite Shahid Kapoor. I was fresh to Bollywood at that time because I had just come back from England and had no clue about hero-heroine dynamics in India.

When I was in high school, I was a bad singer. I mean, all my early acting was musical theater, and my first ever show was 'Jesus Christ Superstar.' Everyone's familiar with it. I played priest number 3 and sang so out of tune that it's not even funny.

When I take on a role, all I tend to do is get to know the script and ask millions of questions, and keep fine tuning what I think the character is trying to say.

You kind of wake up in the morning, and you don't see anybody but these actors until you go home at night and pass out and do it again. So it's structured a lot like the process when you're making a film. You just kind of get in that tunnel vision. I like that. I like when the rest of the world kind of quiets.

I started acting in second grade - my first role was in the Thanksgiving play. I was the Indian chasing the turkey. All the other mom's encouraged my mom to get me into acting after that. Also, when I saw 'The Sound of Music' at Music Circus, I knew I wanted to act.

After 'Prom Night' I did two movies where I was playing a prostitute. I gravitate towards characters that have some sort of inner turmoil or some sort of character arc. That's the great thing about acting, so many different things and being really diverse in your choices.

I prefer playing characters that are going through turmoil. Most movie characters are just in service to the story.

I know this may come as a shock to most of you, but I've decided to quit acting. I will not be auditioning for anything anymore, and if I get offered something like a role in a movie or a commercial or something, I will graciously turn it down. It's been great, but its just not for me anymore.

I feel when acting, I am sometimes overly self-conscious; I think, 'Going, no, don't, put your eyebrow back where it was and, you know, turn to the left.' You know, I'm sort of very consciously adopting this character. But with music, I don't know. I found it was a question of just closing my eyes and just sort of letting things come out.

I'd love to act more. I've had to turn down multiple movies because I was on tour, but it's encouraging to know that someday there might be the right role, the right timing. And I've been writing a lot of music, so hopefully very soon I'll have recorded a project of my own. I also want to get a boat and open a restaurant.

The process of doing films is not my favorite, but I love television. Television is a quicker turnaround. You shoot more during the day, which makes me feel more productive. It would be like, 'I did five scenes today and ten pages.' That's television.

'Fargo' was the turnaround for me, in terms of film, because it was a part; it wasn't a line.

Because, let's face it, I do not get offered the parts that Brad Pitt has just turned down.

I turned my hair dark and have received much better parts ever since.

They wanted me to do Scream 2, and I hate talking about movies I turned down, because it sounds judgmental. There's nothing wrong with horror movies. I enjoy watching them. The main reason I turn a part down is if I think I won't be good.

I never planned to be an actor. It turned out I could make a living doing it.

The only dangerous scene is when James Cromwell put a stake in my chest. But other than that, it turned out to be quite a punch. I didn't think much of it.