Huma Qureshi Quotes

I had been making films for almost ten years, and the head men at RKO thought of me only in terms of musicals. I found no fault with that, except I just couldn't stand being typed or pigeonholed as only a singing and dancing girl. I wanted to extend my range.

It's not fun for an actor to be pigeonholed in any way.

I think any actor in their right mind is afraid of getting pigeonholed.

People only see you as your last role, so it's hard to break out of that.

There are two sides to being pigeonholed. There's, 'Oh, no, I'm going to be Chandler for the rest of my life,' but there's also the fact that getting to play Chandler opened up doors to me. It's now my job to find things that shake it up a little bit.

After doing 'War and Peace,' I suddenly got lots of seductress roles. It's easy to put people into a category after you've seen them in one thing that you feel fits with them. But I'm trying to make a conscious decision to do different things.

Being an actress, I want to play people that are not like me or the characters I've previously played. It's easier to get roles if you play a certain type of character but I don't want to do that.

I sort of went 'Oh, great. I'm getting these great roles and I love doing them, but I'm going to be Anthony Perkins for the rest of my life.'

Now I don't want to feel cornered as an actor, because I've got a wider range than that.

Typecasting is an interesting thing because, in a way, if you're good at something, you're going to work at that thing. In other ways, you constantly have to change people's opinion of you as one thing, especially if you want to play different roles. You have to shatter that image sometimes.

I think if actors are successful at one thing, they paint themselves into a corner sometimes, and what's the fun in that?

I have been typecast in my career, although the type changes with the decades.

It's sort of the mixed blessing of being on television for so long in one thing; sometimes that backfires, in that you're not able to continue on.

I feel blessed that I am able to play really dark guys in a business where they usually want you to play the same character over and over. Poor Michael Rapaport will being playing white homeboys till the day he dies. That's not the kind of career I want.

Hollywood will put you in a box, so to speak. Some people will have seen you in 'La Bamba' or another dramatic film and think, 'Okay, that's what Lou does.' But they don't really have an idea of the range or diversity that I can bring to a project.

I've spent my entire career on horseback or on a motorcycle. It boxes you in, the way people perceive you. I read a lot of scripts. Most of 'em go to other actors.

One of the things that I found very confronting in my early working life was that people thought I was some sensitive doe-eyed lovelorn boy, because they'd seen me do that a couple of times. What tends to happen is you get a run of similar roles.

I got pigeonholed a bit. When I wanted to be an actress, I never wanted to be the kind of actress I became.

If you're a sexy actress, it's hard to get serious roles. You get offered the same thing they've seen you in. People are like sheep, and they're like, 'Oh, that's what she does well.'

People know you as an actor, and labels are so comfortable for people. That syndrome is always hard to get past.

I don't like being pigeonholed at all. It stemmed from after 'Mandy Lane': I was being offered all these horror movies. I love horror movies, but when I dreamed of being a director, it was always doing all sorts of things.

I get the gold-digger part six times weekly. I can play those women into the ground, but I don't want someone telling me that's all I can do.

I could play a lot of things. And it's hard for people and logically hard and understandably hard for people to think of me for certain roles.

The problem with the film industry is that once one starts out as a villain, subsequent offers are those of similar roles.

When you are a really iconic character, everyone thinks that's all you can do. It's nice to show people that I'm not a one-trick pony.