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Actor Quotes


"To be a Dumont actor was considered to be a great honor for an actor, yet it also had its disadvantages."


"It's important to do research. I do that in every play, every actor does."



"As an actor, you want to keep your demons to some extent, but you also have to exorcise them so you can use them instead of them using you."



"I'm not going to say, I'm an actor and I'm changing the world. Who cares?"


"I don't think I could be happy as an actor if there was a tyrant on the set."


"But what I did think would be interesting is if we created a fictitious story of our own, and then took these stories that we had collected and assigned them to characters who would be played by actors."


"I felt unworthy to play Jesus. I just accepted the responsibility and said, 'What actor wouldn't want to play this role?'"


"You ask any actor - they'll tell you they'd rather shoot on location because you don't have to invent the energy, the energy is there."



"I think I've been lucky, being my frequent appearances on Court TV have brought to me another level than just the actor guy."


"In discussing the process with the actors, I made it clear to them that they could improvise but that the sum total of their improvisation needed to impart certain plot points, and schematic material."


"And the test for any actor is whether you stay at the table or go away."



"I view the whole thing as a collaboration. As an actor, I always found that to be the most freeing thing, when the director would collaborate with you, so that together you'd come up with something exponentially better."


"Eisenhower had about the most expressive face I ever painted, I guess. Just like an actor's. Very mobile. When he talked, he used all the facial muscles. And he had a great, wide mouth that I liked. When he smiled, it was just like the sun came out."


"It is hard sometimes to see how other actors are working when you are working with them."


"Juan Hernandez was an actor out of New York, but what made Juan so great and what made Omar so great was that they both already knew how to box, so we didn't have to take them into a gym and teach them how to throw a left jab."


"If you're going to be that kind of actor and go way out there, it's really important to take care of yourself and have a safe place, whatever that is."


"There's editing, and scripts to read and edit, and casting, and all the elements of production that just sort of take up the normal downtime that you would have as an actor. So there's not a lot of that for me."


"I went to Second City, where you learned to make the other actor look good so you looked good and National Lampoon, where you had to create everything out of nothing, and SNL, where you couldn't make any mistakes, and you learned what collaboration was."


"I look for things that are going to challenge me as an actor."


"No actor ever forgets a role, so I should have realized something was wrong."


"I like doing them and they're ridiculous and the actors can improvise a lot, and they don't have to be really realistic characters that hit a very specific tone as in a feature film. They're really fun, I want to make more of them definitely."


"I'm not one of these actors who feels a pressing need to direct, and I have no plans to do it."
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