Naya Rivera Quotes

I was in the wilderness of Hollywood for almost ten years. I was off the studio lists. I wasn't getting the roles offered to actors that hadn't done a third of the roles I had done or had the popularity I had.

Most of the stuff I've written has never even gotten made. It's par for the course. It's a great living, but it also gets very frustrating.

It's hard when you put a year of good work into something and someone at the top says no, and they pull your show's title off a bulletin board and chuck it in the trash.

It never really worked out for me in my own country. They said, 'You're not famous enough for the lead roles, and you're too present for the supporting roles - you'd overpower the lead.'

My first ten years in Hollywood were really tough. I'd be coaching friends who came to me for acting advice, and then they'd make it before I did. I'd still be helping them while they were on movie sets and I had four lines on a TV show.

The worst part about not playing is when you think that you are ready to do it. You try to get more minutes, taking the chances, but you end up in a situation where things have not gone well for you for weeks - or for years. That is like swimming wet clothes.

I had basically been shelved by the record label for two years and I was writing songs every day. I made two albums that just never came out, and that was just a really big knock to my confidence, because everything I sent seemed like it just wasn't good enough.

There never were any roles for my kind of acting. That's the story of my life.

I had started acting when I was 7, and I was always wrong. I would always get to the very end [of the audition], but I wasn't a perfect package of one thing. I wasn't a cliche, and it always worked against me. I wasn't pretty enough to play the popular girl, I wasn't mousy enough to be the mousy girl. Then there was a TV show that Toni Collette was starring in. And when a role to play a girl who was struggling with identity came, I thought: "Oh, this is what I was supposed to do. Everything's leading up to this moment." I was 18. I was like, "This is it." I didn't get it. And I was devastated.

I've been in so many good movies that I felt like nobody saw; it's a pretty dreadful feeling.

It become totally untenable to me that after acting for 25 years - I've played Juliet, Cleopatra and Anne Frank - there I was, sitting in Hollywood, just waiting for somebody to want me.

I made two movies very young, and then I had trouble getting a movie made, and so - which was both, I think, a plus and a minus. It was a minus because it made me unhappy.

I'm in a position where I'm being continually knocked back for the kind of independent films I want to be in because people don't know who I am.

I devoted myself to writing for years without representation or a promise of anything. And there were times when I felt quite down about my prospects.

A lot of my friends are struggling musicians. Being a struggling actor, it's just frustrating because you're not allowed to do what you want to do.

There's only so much you can do of trying, finding yourself very close to getting a part and then not getting it.

Being unemployed is not good for an actor. No, it isn't, no matter how unsuccessful you are. Because you always remember getting fired from all the restaurants. You remember that stuff very, very strongly.

After hundreds of auditions and nothing, you're sitting home and wondering, 'What am I doing?'

I auditioned for this agency. I got an advertisement first, and then something else, which I got fired from. It was soul-destroying. And then the next thing I got, I thought was going to be my big break, and they cut the role. It was only the year that I started auditioning for 'Star Wars' when I really started getting roles.

No one ever wanted to hire me. Ever. I've never been recruited anywhere. I have beat my head against every wall, at every place that I worked.

To be let go from a soap opera is the most embarrassing confidence basher in the world. It's like, 'Oh, if I'm not good enough for that, I'm not good enough for anything.'

You go up for hundreds, thousands of roles, and you get told no, no, no, so many times.

I remember when I was on 'Saturday Night Live' my first year, and I wasn't getting much. I was down; I was ready to quit.

Well, thing is, after they cancelled 'Zen', I didn't work for eight months. And in that case, it was not my choice. After I've done something that I'm really proud of and I think changes the way I'm perceived, the immediate reaction is: nothing.

There will always be times where you think, 'What went wrong? Why wasn't that one more popular?' You can't always figure that out, especially if you think you've done the best job you can do and was interesting to you. I mean, 'My Soul to Take,' I thought should have done much better, and I still like that film a lot.