Even when I was doing well in acting, my dad would say, 'You can still go back to dental school.' But since I've been on '90210,' I haven't heard that.
The key to acting - from what little I know about that wonderful craft - is listening, and interacting with the other person in order to achieve magic. One way to do that is almost to provoke.
Beyond individual intelligence, nature has also cultivated intelligence through swarms. For example, bees, birds and fish act in a more intelligent way when acting together as a swarm, flock or school.
I took a psychology class, and I think the study of the mind can help me further my acting ability. It's also taught me about getting into an environment with new people and acting like you've known them forever.
I was going to design sports cars, but my father came to my college to visit me. At the time he was making a picture in Sweden and he took me there with him. I got to see Ingmar Bergman's company and I thought, 'Gee, filmmaking is a lot more fun than sports cars,' so I decided to follow him and go into acting.
I wanted to be an actor when I saw the movie 'Die Hard.' I saw Bruce Willis shooting guns and blowing stuff up, and I thought, 'I wanna do that.' It really had nothing to do with acting; I just wanted a job that allowed me to do fun, bigger-than-life stuff.
That's what acting is. You're pretending to be someone else.
When I arrived at Columbia, I gave up acting and became interested in all things French. French poetry, French history, French literature.
I was anxious before I decided to go back to acting about what I wanted to do with my life. Once I realized I was sort of interested in acting, I've been pretty lucky and had all these great parts. And I feel pretty much like, 'What will happen will happen.'
The hardest part about acting is realizing it doesn't matter.
My dad spent most of the '50s and early '60s actually acting as sort of an advance man for the Justice Department, as a civil rights lawyer. So it was actually reading his papers after he passed away a few years ago that first started me thinking about this... What fraction of your life do you spend in service to your fellow man?
Television is face acting, and film is eye acting.
We on our part will stick to our independent foreign policy of peace, acting forever as a strong defender of world peace and a persistent proponent of common development.
It's not that we go around the set thinking, 'Oh, today we are going to kiss, so let's enjoy'. It's not that. It's acting. If it's important for the script, so be it.
I enjoyed acting and marveled that one could get paid for doing it.
I'm really, really interested in the job of acting. I can really care less about being famous. I'm more about the work, and 'The Big C' was amazing, so I wanted to be a part of it.
Acting changed my life. I say God and then acting. Because becoming an actor, I've gained a new respect for humanity. And I believe that it's also helped me to grow as a person. It's been one of the biggest blessings and expressions that I could have ever been gifted with.
What I learned is that acting is to a large extent about trying to stave off self-doubt long enough to be natural and real onstage.
After 'The Real Thing,' I thought about giving up acting because it's difficult to have a rich life outside your work when you're an actress, a private life that can survive being picked up and put down. That's what I thought, anyway.
With acting, I felt like I had a lot to prove because I didn't study it; I didn't work my way up in a traditional sense.
I was born in North Carolina but moved to a suburb just outside of Philadelphia when I was 5, so mostly grew up there. I decided I wanted to become an actor when I was 8 years old. I literally heard a friend on the playground bragging about how he was taking acting classes and thought, 'Oh! That's what I'm supposed to be doing!'
I probably prefer comedy. Why? I'm not sure. I feel like the energy of a comedy is a better fit for me. I try to be a happy guy! It seems that most of my life has the energy more for a comedy than for drama. I'm grateful to do both, but I would have to lean towards the comedy side of acting.
Anything negative that happens to you in life can be turned into a positive as far as acting is concerned. You can draw on your experiences - it's far better than any research.
I did direct two short movies. I learned many things, and one of the things I learned was that I am not a director. It has to be visceral, and it's not for me. I feel much more comfortable acting.
You can always keep learning with acting, because the school is life and yourself and your friends and your relationships. I'm fascinated by it! It's infinito!
I went to UCLA as pre-med. When I was there my freshman year, I auditioned for a play and got it, and I was so passionate. I just loved acting so much that I decided to switch majors and pursue acting.
The only people who have doubts about the sincerity of my music are people who come to it relatively late, off the back of having seen me in a film. Acting is about being other people, and music is about being myself.
I know very little about acting. I'm just an incredibly gifted faker.
Whenever I go to any particular event, people are shocked that I'm a fighter. To be a fighter, I have to look a certain way, and to be an actress, I have to look a certain way. I have to change that; I've joined acting to do meaningful cinema and to show that there is much more than glamour that actresses can offer.
In war, people find themselves in extraordinary circumstances, and in those circumstances, they act in extraordinary ways. In war, you see people at their very best and their very worst, acting in ways you could never imagine. War is human drama at its most epic and most intense.
A lot of child actors keep acting for the wrong reasons.
I did some acting in college. But then everything stopped when I was a junior, in the fall of 2001, when I started becoming religious. Once I became a full-on Hasidic, I stopped everything. I stopped music. I stopped acting.
It was the desire to do the complete thing. I only took taking acting lessons because my whole thing, really, was to direct. But my first jobs were acting jobs.
I see myself as a character actor, and I've always been drawn to playing characters that are different from myself because acting is escapism for me. I've never been that comfortable playing people that are like me.
Acting helped me as I was growing up. It helped me learn about myself, helped me travel, helped me understand life, express myself, all those wonderful things. So I'm very, very grateful; it's a fun job. It's a luxury.
I loved acting, which was never about money, the fame. It was about a search for meaning. It was painful.
