Mahershala Ali Quotes

Quiet people, people who aren't given to emotional outbursts, people who are economic with words - they're also fun to play, but you find yourself needing a laser precision in those roles. Otherwise you just sort of stand around, looking slightly brain-dead. You worry about being uninteresting.

Sometimes I'm playing somebody that I may have a problem with. Your job as an actor is not to go only play things that make you look good.

One thing that somebody told me is that leadership is a lonely role - some people can do it, and some people can't.

I went through this realization that acting, at its heart, is the ability to manipulate your own emotions.

A lot of people think that they are leaders just because they have been placed in charge of something - and you're not.

There's going to be situations that you get into that you're going to need help, for sure. But for the most part, I think coaching is just understanding who you have and your team, understanding yourself, and understanding the situation.

Managers have very tough jobs. I always respected their job but demanded respect in return.

It's always really challenging trying to go from player to player/coach. You have a kind of friendship basis of relationship with all of your teammates, and now you go to this power position where you have to make decisions that might hurt people's feelings.

With acting, I always feel conscious of what I'm doing.

With big, emotional roles it's very easy, especially if you've grown up in the American school of acting, to exploit your own pain. You have to be careful about that, because 9 times out of 10, your pain is not appropriate to the character.

At the end of the program, I tried to talk to the kids a little bit about life skills.

If you really do want to be an actor who can satisfy himself and his audience, you need to be vulnerable. You must reach the emotional and intellectual level of ability where you can go out stark naked, emotionally, in front of an audience.

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.

As an actor, you wouldn't be able to play a character if you were worried about the reaction to what you're doing.

I think for leadership positions, emotional intelligence is more important than cognitive intelligence. People with emotional intelligence usually have a lot of cognitive intelligence, but that's not always true the other way around.

If I'm a leader, I have a mission.

On land, you can walk away from people, from unpleasant situations. But when you're on a ship for 14 months with 49 other people, if you don't resolve your issues it literally could mean - and this would be an extreme circumstance - the sinking of the ship. You learn a lot about other people. You learn a lot about yourself.

In theater, the wellspring of the character comes from the doing of it, like a trial by fire, but in front of an audience.

Crazy is so hard to play, there's nothing you can really tell an actor.

During my time as England captain I have always been both helpful and direct in my communications with the ECB.

Your own barometer is all you have to go by, and often what makes a good director is knowing when not to say something. On occasions you can find yourself on a film set where the person who is wearing the director's hat is only trying to justify his position.

In most job interviews, people say they are looking for people skills and emotional intelligence. That's reasonable, but the question is, how do you define what that looks like?

One word sums up probably the responsibility of any vice-president, and that one word is 'to be prepared'.

I'm quite modest. I don't want to tell people I'm a leader.

I'd not really ever expected to play anything like 'Hamlet.' I hadn't seen myself as a natural Hamlet, whatever a natural Hamlet is, and I quickly realised there is no such thing.