Rob Reiner Quotes

The only thing I haven't done as an actor, other than Thai puppet theater somewhere, is act on a Broadway stage.

I then moved to LA when I was 16... but before that I had done a play on Broadway.

I probably never would have been hired on Broadway had I not moved out to L.A. and pursued acting and film, which is sad, really.

I liked 'Brighton Beach Memoirs,' which I did with Neil Simon. I kind of was playing him, as Eugene Morris Jerome, and I played that a few times at the very beginning of my career.

I started doing regional theater. My first job was 'The Importance of Being Earnest' at Dallas Theater Center.

I had always been interested in screenwriting, ever since I could write things down as a child. Obviously, I started as an actor, professionally, but screenwriting was always something that I had a great interest in.

My theatre background is probably more extensive then my film, and I have done a fair bit of television.

I got my Equity Card from Berkeley Rep when I was 22 years old. I was cast in David Saar's 'The Yellow Boat.'

I started out doing commercials, like Diet Coke and Pizza Hut. And I started to find there was a different life for me, in a different field. From there, I got a call from a director in Italy, and we did 'Indio' I and II, and that's where it started.

I wanted to be a classical actress. I plodded along. I went to junior college in San Francisco, I was in a Repertory Company. My hero was Eva Le Gallienne, who was a great theater actress at the turn of the century who created her own company, and she wrote these hilarious autobiographies at the time.

I never took any theater lessons. So when I started to do movies, I was 14.

When I was beginning, a young actor could go from repertory company to repertory company. I did that and loved it. I was also lucky.

When I moved to New York City in 1965, I wanted to be in theater. I was following my Ethel Barrymore dream. But I was too young to be Ethel.

So, through all that early professional career I would occasionally do a musical, a pantomime or a play with songs. The next stop would be a Shakespeare, or an Ibsen, or a play by a brand new writer who had never done anything in the theater before.

I had worked in this New York theatre company for my first eight or nine years out of college, acting and directing there, and I'd begun to write a little bit.

People say, 'What are your hobbies?' I say, 'I've been doing shows ever since I was a kid.' When I left college, all I wanted to be was a musical theater chick. I auditioned tons. It just didn't pan out.

The first 10 years I was a professional actor, I did Shakespeare.

I'd been acting in Chicago since I came back after University, and I got a call from my agent saying, 'They're doing this revival of 'On a Clear Day,' and I actually auditioned when the team came through Chicago for the 'American Idiot' tour.

My first paying gig was a play called 'The Voice of the Prairie' at a theater that no longer exists in Chicago called Wisdom Bridge. I played a fast-talking radio huckster - a salesman of crystal sets in the 1920s - and I actually won an award. Look at that! And then promptly didn't get hired for a year.

I was working in Lexington when I recognized this actor, Michael Shannon, and I was like, 'What do you do?' He told me to get into a theater company, so I got into a theater company near my hometown. I was a carpenter there. And then I slowly got some work.

I started in television as a youngster and was 14 when I started acting professionally.

I was only in one play at Steppenwolf, in the early days.

I spent a lot of time in the trenches in New York doing a lot of off-off-off Broadway theater.

I've been calling myself 'just an actor' since I was 6 years old. That's a long time.

I used to do a lot of repertory theater. You're playing different roles all the time, and I love that.