Jeremy Davies Quotes

It's a great challenge to come from little New Zealand and beat the odds in Hollywood.

Nobody really thought I was going to make it, because I was a musician. I really wasn't a singer.

I know that a lot of people take inspiration from the fact that I was just a common man with no film background who turned into a star.

I am an actor who turned hero at age 32, after many years of struggle. I wanted to break the stereotype that only good-looking men with a good complexion, height and physique can be heroes, which I have managed to do.

Because I'm short and slim, I can identify with somebody who's an unlikely fit for something and desperately wants to be part of it.

If you think about where I'm from, I'm not supposed to be singing in the first place. I'm not supposed to be alive right now.

I was a freshman and auditioned for the school play. Freshmen usually never got cast. I was the first freshman to be actually given a legitimate part and it was that feeling of 'Wow! I broke the system!'

To be great we need to win games we aren't supposed to win.

People always put me completely out of the game, and that's even nicer because nobody expects you to do a good job and then you do a better job than everybody thinks and it's nicer.

Who can't relate to a story of a dreamer who, against all odds, is going to make something of himself that is completely unexpected?

I just love the idea of ordinary people doing extraordinary things, whether it's the success of 'Cool Runnings,' which is the success of four guys from Jamaica who had never seen snow, or whether it's my success, just as a human being.

I am a five-foot six-inch, dark, ordinary-looking man. People didn't imagine that I would make it.

I remember one director in Argentina said to me, 'You are not going to have any opportunity to be a leading lady because of your height.' And I didn't care. I don't have a complex.

When I was a child, I saw in the news that a person from Belitung had done well in sports in Jakarta, and I just couldn't imagine that it was possible for someone from here to become famous, and it's still very isolated out here.

Bananarama were written off from day one. Nobody believed in us but us. We kept having hits despite the record company, despite the press.

It is strange when you're a loser in college, which I was, to then get your own show.

As a person who came from a small town and had dreams of becoming an actor, I know what it's like to have no support system for what it is that you want to do. A lot of people think you don't have a chance.

People never expected a boy from a small town to have a life like I did.

I'm still ambivalent about Hollywood. I think that's why I made 'Star 80.' To deal with the ambivalence. I really wanted to succeed Gene Kelly, and I thought it was a fair bet.

I have no credentials. I have no money. I literally come from a poor place. I was a servant. I dropped out of college. The next thing you know I'm writing for the 'New Yorker,' I have this sort of life, and it must seem annoying to people.

I became a writer in spite of my environments.

It is horrible to say, but I was stigmatized by being a bridal designer for a long time. I am amazed I have been able to move beyond it. I had really all but given up trying, but I did it because it was my lifelong dream.

When you make your first film at 47 and anybody but your mother goes to see it, to me, that's a miracle.

I've always been an underdog. I feel like I beat the odds.

There's hardly any precedent for a guy like me to have the career that I've had. Because I grew up the way I grew up, I'm an in-your-face kind of guy. I developed that as a defense mechanism to survive in the streets. I do that in Hollywood in the service of my passion.