Josh Gad Quotes

The only reason my work seems to be eclectic up to a certain period is because I was a failure as an actor.

Literally, I think I've quit acting three or four times, only for a few days. Maybe for a few weeks.

You know when people leave a job, and they say they didn't know what they came away with after two years? That's how I felt when I first left Google.

I left 'Saturday Night Live' without a film to go to, and I'd filmed 'Old School' while I was in my last season of the show, and that hadn't come out yet. I was a free agent, in a way, but I knew it was time to leave the show and test the water.

I'm trying to mix the cool, independent stuff with the big stuff, but it's been difficult finding the right roles. It's been an interesting ride as far as my career pendulum is concerned.

I'm always trying to look for different roles.

Your post-college years should be an exploratory time in your professional life. From your early twenties and on into your early thirties, you should feel free to explore your professional prospects. Keep an open mind, and don't expect to get everything right straight out of the gate. Be prepared to start over once or twice.

After 'Rings,' I had two feelings: One, I immediately didn't want to work on anything on a large scale. I wanted to work on something really small after I was finished filming the first three. But the other thing was that I had a continuing interest in working on things that were really different.

Part of me, even when I was trying to get acting jobs, I was still kind of thinking, 'Oh I should do something else with my life.'

I kind of had a quarter-life crisis before I did 'Rent.' I had done Glinda in 'Wicked' for a while. I had worked for Cirque Du Soleil, and then I did 'Hair.' Then I had a real quiet time, not having work, and it was a time of not only self-discovery of me as a person, but also what I wanted as an artist and actor.

It's interesting to work with Emma [Watson] so quickly after Harry Potter. When we shot this movie, it wasn't that long after Harry Potter was finished, and it's knowing that's a big transition in her life. She's a very talented young woman.

I was at home waiting for projects. I was on Parenthood and there was one season left, and I was thinking, "What's next?" I'm at this age where I'm trying to write my own script, and they sent this over and I decided to put myself on tape.

When I started acting, I made a conscious decision that I wanted to be a character read and not a leading man. I didn't want to do the same thing again and again. I wanted to push and challenge myself. I find and embrace new and unique challenges in all mediums.

When someone gets closely related to a character they play on TV, it's very hard to break that mold and go on to do something else.

I found at a certain point in my acting career that I was just bored. I had too much energy. I had too many ideas.

I think that there have definitely been points when I've had to fight to move my career in a different direction. I think, 2012, I did a few movies that touched on a darker side, and those are movies I'd been wanting to make and stories I'd been wanting to tell for a while. So I think it definitely takes work to move genres.

I had opportunities to stay on shows for long periods of time, and maybe financially that would have been good, but I feel good about trying to keep doing things that are a little bit different than what I've done.

My career has never really been a vertical kind of thing. I mean, it's always been a bit difficult for me.

Early on in my career, when I had basically been a sitcom actor for all of these years, and I made my first movies, and they were comedies, and they were successes, it was very important for me to stretch, and 'Parenthood' was one of those films. Even though it was a comedy, there was a great deal of authentic drama in the piece as well.

I had no idea when I graduated from high school and then from graduate school what I wanted to do with my life. I had no idea that I was ever going to be an actor.

I realized early on that if I became an actor, I could play a writer and a sculptor and a painter and be all the things you just don't have time to be in your lifetime. I could get to learn about all of them.

I was playing a lot of bigger, sort-of-comedic characters in slightly heightened realities, and it had been so fun and fulfilling for a long time. But it got to a point where I just felt like I didn't have that in me anymore.

I've been very lucky to work with great filmmakers. But I think my days of just freely acting regularly, that being my sole creative fulfillment, are gone.

I don't look at myself as a Scream Queen, and I don't plan on continuing on this genre route. If anything, I want to go very different places.

I think, as an actor, when you're starting off early in your career, you're kind of just seeing what lands. But 'Veronica Mars' definitely primed me to look for surprising, dynamic women. It took me awhile to realize how cool that job was.