Ato Essandoh Quotes

I love doing impressions and I love doing accents.

I started out as an impressionist and that's all about observing - how people move, their voice quality, their attitudes and quirks.

I love doing impressions.

I did accents and funny voices for the family when I was growing up.

My friends were the class clowns, but I was the one in class doing Michael Jordan or teachers for no reason. I've always been amazing at impersonating real people, too, rather than celebrities.

It was interesting doing impressions as somebody else doing impressions. Normally, I'll do a voice, and it's me doing the voice. To have to be Robin Williams doing the voice was an interesting sort of study in getting into somebody's head.

I could do John Wayne, Jack Benny, Jack Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and entertain my friends. But I never seriously considered it as a career choice.

I'm not a very good impersonator, my friends maybe, but not famous people.

I've been doing silly voices since I was a child.

I just love to impersonate people, and I impersonate people because I find them fascinating.

People are confusing me with a good actor when I'm just a good mimic. When someone asks me to play a nun from the fifteenth century, you'll see what I mean.

I'm not an impersonator. I'm a lousy impersonator, actually.

I think impersonation is a great art. It's something that I enjoy doing, in a frivolous and lighthearted way. But I don't flatter myself to think I'm an impersonator.

I got obsessed with impersonations: impersonating people that I knew - people, not famous people but people like my family. At first, it was just fun; it's always been just fun. But I sort of got to a point in maybe seventh or eighth grade where I started getting heavily involved in drama programs via programs in my high school.

I was impersonating people way, way, way early, as far back as I can remember. And I would do people on my street for my parents, I remember. And in school, I did the same thing with all the teachers. It was just like, I mean, it was something I loved to do. I don't think there was a time when I wasn't doing it. I was always doing it.

I do constantly get to change the way I look, which is sort of an old-school idea of acting.

There were two things that became apparent, pretty quickly into the process. One was that the muscles didn't take as much reconditioning as I thought they would. It was more like voice acting than I thought it would be. You're using your whole body and there are things that are different, but when you are doing a character, even in the booth, nobody is watching but my face will do different things when I do different characters.

I did Popeye and Ronald Reagan and everybody was saying things like "yeah he's a cute little kid" but I started, little by little, telling stories about people I'd met and expanded my voices.

I can't do an accent unless I'm on the set. I forget how to do it until I'm on the set.

Everybody thinks performance capture is about thrashing around and doing a lots of movement, but it's actually about being able to contain and think and be believed in a close-up, as much as anything else.

I've been told that I'm good at impersonating people.

I've got to tell you, I've played real characters before and people always bring up this word 'impersonation,' and I'm never entirely sure what it means.

When you perform, you can convey emotions differently, and your look can reflect each of those emotions.

Comedians are not usually actors, but imitations of actors.

Good actors, you always know what they're thinking. That's why they're good actors.