I could count my modeling jobs on my hands and toes. When I graduated from college, I moved to New York specifically to study acting, and I needed to pay the bills, and it's better to make a couple thousand dollars in one day than to wait tables six days a week.
I go to an acting class every Sunday.
I was involved in music, acting, and some running, but my firm wish was to become a doctor. That was the formative age when I had decided on the pattern of my career.
Good acting is consistency of performance.
I wrote a script. I actually enjoyed writing it more than acting. It's about the Irish rebellion of 1920, which is a fascinating period and place for me.
Because of my background in theater and radio acting, I knew that I could make a living as an actor.
Acting is like a sporting match; a tennis game, but no one should win or lose. The game's the thing!
My family was very supportive of my acting. They didn't really have a choice because I got jobs acting before anyone could really say anything. It paid my way through college and helped my family out.
I stumbled into acting and just loved it. I deferred law school-and I'm still deferred.
I think when you're just counting on your voice, you actually need double the energy. I find myself acting out the scenes and being very physical while I'm recording because I think you can tell when someone is just sitting on a stool.
Psychology and acting are very closely linked. It's just about studying people and how they work. It can be an incredible discipline and exercise.
Even when I was an actor in training, one criticism my teachers had was that I should think about directing instead of acting, because the best actors see the material they're working on through blinders. They can't see anything but their role. I could never really do that.
I've been acting since I was 10. At age 14, 15 and 16, it's difficult to find roles and to find yourself, even, and when everyone's eyes are on you, it's difficult.
When you're young, you don't really know quite what you're aiming at. You're very impulsive and acting on impulse, which is very important and valuable. But you're kind of swimming in a blind sea. When you get older, you have more of a sense of direction.
There is this immediate connection, this intimacy when you're acting because there's no room to be polite or shy. Also, as an actor I get to connect with women I've never met before.
I'm always in the market for my acting.
Acting is a form of confusion.
An actor has to be very, very careful, as one of the most wonderful props - and actors love props - is a cigarette. There's so much to do with it: you can bring it up to your face, play with the smoke. It's just the greatest - ever since I was 16 and in acting school in England, I've been playing around with cigarettes.
We grew up in abject poverty. Acting, writing scripts and skits were a way of escaping our environment at a very young age.
I would love to do something dramatic. I don't know if anybody will ever give me the chance, but I would love to try it. I'm trained in acting and spent many years working on it, so it's just a matter of opportunity.
I moved to Chicago and I did theater, and then I started writing and I stop acting and I did sketch. You know, I did all of the things that, if you were serious about doing television, don't do.
When I finally decided that my only hope was to go to college, I took an acting class, and once I walked onstage, I just knew I was home.
Acting's not therapy, but it can be therapeutic.
I've been training as an actor for six years. Nobody goes to acting school for six years. I mean, the college course is only four years! I absolutely trained.
Singing and acting suit me. I made a vow to myself to do everything that I can do with this life that I have, and I have to find the time to do this. Sometimes I need to be an actress. Sometimes I don't need to be Jill. However, everyone is always looking for the Jill in everything.
On some level, acting is the art of pretend, and you have to have a highly cultivated sense of imagination. You have to be able to see things that aren't there, no matter what aspect of acting, whether it's green screen, whether it's on stage, whether it's anything else, whether you're working on the radio.
The sovereigns of the Internet are acting like they have a divine right to govern.
Sometimes, when you're acting, you are so in the moment that you don't even remember what just happened.
The U.S.-led western alliance, while acting as an advocate of democracy, rule of law and human rights, is acting from the opposite position, rejecting the democratic principle of the sovereign right of states enshrined in the U.N. Charter and trying to decide for others what is good and what is bad.
I'm trying to think how I impressed my wife. We had an on-stage kiss, and I really went for it. Because I liked her. Usually you can get away with it being just technical, but it was a problem when I ended up kissing my wife on the set. I'd say I stopped acting and kissed her on set.
When I was younger, I had no interest. But after I went to Paris to see the collections for the first time a few years ago, they made a huge impression on me. I realized that fashion is an art form, like acting or painting.
The trick is not to become somebody else. You become somebody else when you're in front of a camera or when you're on stage. There are some people who carry it all the time. That, to me, is not acting.
I don't know how to be like a Bill Murray or a Will Ferrell, these guys who know how to make a line funny just by, I don't know, some extra-sense perception. I only know character and emotion and real acting; that's all I know how to do.
I moved to Manchester to join a band and ended up getting into acting, and I moved back to London to become an actor and ended up joining a band.
I went into show business because I love to work with people, and what I enjoy most about acting is rehearsing and getting to know people and their talents, forming relationships. Working in this business, barriers drop and you get into people real quickly.
Every time I've made a plan in my Hollywood acting career, something else has happened, so I've gotten out of the habit of trying to predict the future.
