Dante Basco Quotes

I have these surreal moments where I'm like, 'I'm pregnant with Jake Gyllenhaal's baby' and 'I'm telling Robert Pattinson that he smells of sex.' But you're acting, so the focus is on the work.

I was used to playing misled youth, rough-and-tumble guys. It was nice to get back to a big-hearted, warm and gentle soul, a guy who is destined for something a lot larger than he ever expected.

Like any other actor, I draw on life experience.

Robin Williams was a cultural hero of mine, and in the encounters and interactions I was able to share with him, he was always gentle and generous, humane and thoughtful and hilarious.

Richard Pryor had real sincere and vulnerable moments.

I've been largely an improvisational actor for most of my career.

It's a little bit odd. The first time you do the play, you kind of throw yourself into it, trying to get the most out of all the individual moments. Then, a few hours later, you're still there, wondering what you could possibly do differently than what you just did a couple hours ago.

Roy Orbison was one of the genuinely nicest persons I've ever known. With one of the most beautiful voices in the history of recorded music he could easily have had an opera star's ego, but he was one of the humblest, kindest, sweetest human beings to grace this planet. This in spite of the enormous tragedies in his life. A brave, beautiful blessing of a man.

I think most great actors have their own life trajectory, the character motion doesn't have anything to do with their life motion.

I did absolutely love playing Tabaqui, the hyena, who is morally conflicted and a villain, but also quite sweet.

I haven't read the comic book. I didn't even know there was one until about halfway though. Helen Mirren and I were talking about that actually, who also felt kind of silly. When we had to run she was like, 'Oh God, we're both going to get fired.' The running sequences, it's a particular kind of humiliation because it's fun.

When you improvise on the spot, people are very reluctant to have soft moments or quiet moments or sad moments because they're trying to fill up the spaces. So they always go towards, "How come you're late?! You're supposed to have my shirt ready! You call this a dry cleaner?!" That's what happens. That's why improvising on the spot gets very dicey.

There are so many varieties of films. You've got the jet-lagged films, where you fly to Bulgaria or wherever and get off the plane, and they bring you right to the set, and you start working, even though I don't even know my name, it's been such a long flight. Then there's the alimony films. But after you've been doing this long enough, you've gotten into every kind of situation you can imagine, even to the point where there is basically no script, so you have to kind of do it scene by scene and survive.

You learn from the actors that you're working with. I've taken a lot from all of them.

Robin Williams was an airman, a doctor, a genie, a nanny, a president, a professor, a bangarang Peter Pan, and everything in between. But he was one of a kind....He arrived in our lives as an alien but he ended up touching every element of the human spirit

For me, my storyline [in Big Little Lies] is very complicated and nuanced. [The script] was so beautifully written. It was very, very easy to play. ... I think one of the scenes is almost eight minutes.

Michael, from 'Six Dance Lessons...' He was somebody who had a lot of self-loathing; being a gay man who lost his family and felt ostracized. It was an interesting character to play. He was so bitter and jaded about life. Even though I'm not like that personally, everybody has a side of themselves that tends to look at the negative side of things. He was an interesting character to play.

I enjoy being an actor largely; in part at least, because you get to walk a mile in another person's shoes, you get to see what their skin is like. The other good thing is you get to leave it.

But, as an actress, you don't want to run into these scenes, willy-nilly. The couple that I did do were important for the character and essential to the plot, to show what was actually going on between each character. It is great to be able to have that, and to be able to say certain things and have certain passions.

With Eclipse, I felt like I was doing a completely different movie and a completely different character. So, yeah, it was nice and challenging.

I don't think that many people today, understand the nature of what an improv does for an actor in a specific setting. What an improv does for an actor is help him find the life; it's the life that an actor's after.

There are two different kinds of actors. There are people who take it just so damn seriously. Then there are guys like me that just get up and love doing it.

I realize I have a lot of amazing opportunities, but I don't know how you can play a human being going through real human experiences without being able to walk down the street. If you can't live a real life, how do you play a real person? It always confuses me when actors work back-to-back-to-back with no break. If you live your life on a film set, how the hell can you relate to real people? You don't know what its like to not have people fussing over you all day, and that's not life - that's silly movies. I will always want to take breaks and I wouldn't be OK with losing that.

I am moved by fancies that are curled, around these images and cling, the notion of some infinitely gentle, infinitely suffering thing.