Navid Negahban Quotes

And lot of Asian audiences and reporters don't like me to act as a bad guy. But I think I want to become an actor, I want to try different way.

I do keep getting these bad girl roles. The funny thing is that, honestly, I don't think I'm believable as these aristocratic mean girls. But I do love playing them.

Being Latino and being an actor has been a unique struggle and opportunity. When you don't fit into what may be a more stereotypical vision of somebody whose name is Pedro is, it can be a little bit harder to navigate.

I like to create characters that are larger than life. But it's funny because I do a lot of bad guys, and it's because, being European, I usually get cast as bad guys. It's just how it is.

I'm just trying to play against ethnicity. I got to play a guy from Louisiana in 'The Pacific' named Merriell Shelton, and now I'm playing Elliot Alderman.

People always say, 'Oh, you've played a lot of waifs... ' but they were just girls. It's just that a lot of those everyday characters had never been on the screen before. I do hope I didn't get typed. I feel myself that I tried to do different things with those women.

For me, playing a mother was a point of resistance; the question of 'will I get typecast' was going on in my mind.

Usually, I play the bad guy, so it's been a pleasant break to play a good guy.

I have always wanted to play different kinds of stuff, but it's hard, first to find good material, and then to change people's perception of you so they'll let you do it. I mean, I would really like to play a poet, but once they get this notion of you as a street guy, it's hard to change that.

I started out in the 1970s doing the Wife, the Bimbo, and the Ditz, and if I somehow get a serious role, they all wanna know the same thing: When are you going back to comedy?

When I decided to crop what was left of my hair, I thought, 'It's all over. I'm never going to work again: it's basket weaving me for me from now on.' But what actually happens is your casting changes: you suddenly start to get a lot of villains and coppers and soldiers and even the odd sensitive vicar - you become institutionalised.

Any character who had dark skin, I got all those parts. I could play a Polynesian, East Indian princess, whatever.

I was always typecast as a Latina.

I couldn't get roles as bad guys. They could see John Travolta as a gangster but not me, really. But, you know, that's just how things are.

I think you get the parts that people are comfortable with seeing you play.

People say you get identified with a role, and you get stereotyped, but I haven't found that to be the case.

People ask me, 'Are you worried you're going to be typecast as a John Locke type of guy?' I say he's the perfect guy to be typecast as! He's vulnerable and ambitious and sort of unstable. It was a good actor's role.

A lot of times in Hollywood, when casting directors find out you're of Middle Eastern descent, they go, 'Oh, you're Iranian? Great. Can you say, 'I will kill you in the name of Allah?'' I could say that, but what if I were to say, 'Hello, I'm your doctor.'

I like playing the bad guys. It's a way of exercising and exorcising my own personal demons.

I thought, 'Oh, acting is going to be great - I get to play different parts.' And then these auditions started coming up for terrorist, terrorist, terrorist, and I'm going, 'Whoa, what's this about?'

I do believe, as a person of color, the disparities are great. A lot of the roles that were sent to me were 'Gangbanger No. 1.' And when a role did come up that I felt carried and represented my community in the best ways, I wasn't the only one that knew it existed. So I'd have to compete.

In 'The Goods,' I'm Ed Helms' dad, and I was known all those years as Kirk Cameron's father, and now I'm known as Robin Thicke's father, so I find myself playing myself a lot and, frankly, living up to expectations of what the public's image of me is.

When I was studying comedy in Chicago, it wasn't long after 9/11. There were a lot Middle Eastern comedians who were doing bits about hailing cabs and being terrorists. So the first two years, I didn't do any of that because I wanted to separate myself from those guys. But race is a big part of who I am, and it should be a big part of my comedy.

Being the house ethnic was destroying my life and my sense of myself, because I had been consigned to play every dusky maiden you have ever seen in your life in movies.

There was that sense that as soon as a Northern Irish person opens their mouth, you go, 'Ah, terrorist,' so I refused to do TV and film. Instead, I did theatre for 20 years.