I don't think I know enough about acting to direct. You need to be a slight megalomaniac, not where you want to take over the world, but where you want to make every single decision and the buck stops with you. It's an awful lot of stress.
We must be able to inspire. That's my goal in acting.
Acting is sort of an extension of childhood. You get to play all of these roles and have so much fun. Playing an athlete would be so cool. Or where you get to shoot guns, ride horses. I wouldn't turn down any of that.
Acting has to do with saying it as if you meant it, so for me the words are always very important. It's very important for me to know my lines, know them so well that I don't have to think about them.
When I was young, my parents made me listen to old music and watch Jimmy Durante. I fell in love with the whole mystique of acting and entertainment.
I moved here to California when I was 13 to pursue my acting career.
Love is as strict as acting. If you want to love somebody, stand there and do it. If you don't, don't. There are no other choices.
On 'Into The Wild' I spent months risking my life and on 'Speed Racer' I spent 60 days acting in front of a green screen. No danger to my physical self, but I sure had to use my imagination.
I feel like acting is sort of like that: You're getting so many 'no's all the time. It's just a bunch of no's and a couple of cool yes's. And especially with comedy, too, when you're up on stage, doing live shows, you get immediate yes's or no's.
I feel like I came to acting late in a way.
In college, I took an acting class as a lark. I was surprised by how much it interested me. It seemed like something I could do my whole life and always try to get better at.
Acting ceases to be work because I enjoy it. But it feels like working when I do bad work, especially when I know it is bad.
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.
Good acting is really excellent carpentry.
I still really love acting. I find it really challenging. And I really love film; it's a lot of fun.
A lot of acting, and I believe this, is either you can do it or you can't.
People might think writing is a hard business, but it's nowhere near acting.
The reason I got into acting was not to explore myself. I was a reader, I didn't care about acting. I got into it in college, but I had no interest really in that, in getting up in front of anybody.
I love acting. It is so much more real than life.
I have actual acting scars.
I am artistic so I reserve the right to change my mind at any point. I just like to do different things. What is more important than the name is that people know that I really like acting, I enjoy it and I want people to know that I am serious.
Acting is the most personal of our crafts. The make-up of a human being - his physical, mental and emotional habits - influence his acting to a much greater extent than commonly recognized.
I'm not really one of those people who goes and writes some big back story and agonizes over characters. I think you kind of can get it. For me personally, it's just kind of more instinctive. But I don't have kind of an acting background. I fell into it accidentally.
For an actor, if you're not doing a job, you can't just practice acting. Your instrument is your whole person.
I was never a villain on the stage. I always played strong, sympathetic types. My first stage role with a speaking part, believe it or not, was as a priest. It wasn't until I began acting in films that the producers and directors saw me primarily as a bizarre villain.
Acting is such a huge part of my life. It really allows me to have a creative outlet and to actually be able to have an outlet to discuss openly the things that truly I think are relevant in the world, that make a difference.
Acting feels different. I'm not sure exactly what that is, but it used to mean a lot more. Maybe that sounds like I'm throwing it away and I'm not, I'll still do the best damn job I can, but it doesn't mean the same thing. I'm going to get the answer for myself one of these days. It's the male menopause, that's what it is.
It's what still excites me most about acting: letting your imagination go places it's never been before. There's nothing better than that.
Modeling is really silent acting.
I realized that acting was the thing I was still maybe the best at. Of the things I felt like I was good at, that was the thing that came the most naturally to me.
Then a year would go by and I'd realize I love the acting too much and it is my identity and I don't know how to be anything but an actress. It's who and what I am, so I always come back.
What I enjoy most is travelling to different places and meeting new people. For me, it's all about life experiences, and I'm very grateful that acting allows me so many interesting and fulfilling ones.
I went into acting because I had to make a good living. I had a child now and I had to support him any way I could... I wasn't happy, but I wasn't unhappy. I was just doing what I had to do to survive.
I think when I first started acting there were different people who I thought, 'I want that person's career or that person's career.' And as time has gone on, it's become really clear to me what is important to me; getting the best roles, the roles that I feel are challenging and scary and that I haven't done yet.
I kind of realized I could sing, so I played around with that for a while. And that led me to acting in itself, which I came more passionate about by the age of 15.
I knew from a young age that I wanted to be an actor. I never even thought about other careers. The acting field is certainly not the path many Indian parents encourage their children to take, but mine were very supportive. They wanted me to have an education, but understood that this is what I wanted to do.
