Condola Rashad Quotes

Anytime you get a chance to play some extreme character, in any direction, it's always a great blessing.

I think the beautiful thing about acting is you don't really know who you are. You're able to be whatever you want any day during the week. So I really couldn't see myself being anything else.

Your basic physical makeup does influence the parts you're offered. If you're big, they cast you either dumb or tough, although there are exceptions. Clint Eastwood and James Arness carved out niches for themselves in Westerns. I just hope I won't be faced with doing 'Li'l Abner' in dinner theater for the rest of my career.

I like to stretch myself, and playing a dance-hall hostess is quite a stretch, but I feel comfortable with it.

As fun as it is to be the nerdy best friend. I'm capable of more than that, and I feel that I have emotions to share, and there are roles I can add something to. I just hope there are other people who are willing to take that chance on me and let me tell their stories.

I'm far, far, far from that. But of course, that's one of the joys of acting is that you can move up in the world, even if - you know, in the characters that you're playing, even if you don't.

I love everything. I love being the empathetic characters. I love being the villains. I think it's like when we're kids, we like to play all kinds of crazy characters and dress up.

I love the idea of getting to play different characters and tell some stories. When you're passionate about a project, it's nice to get the part.

I don't think there's a certain part of a character I take with me. There's a certain part of me I leave with each character, though.

With every character, you alter, you can’t be attached to your own identity.

I love my job, I love being an actor and stepping into the shoes of different characters and exploring their lives. It's enriched my life extremely. I've learned more about myself and the ways of life through being an actor.

It’s always about, somehow, finding a part of myself that is relevant, and then turning the volume up on that particular part. So, I am all of the characters I've ever played, and I am none of them at the same time.

I turn 30 next month, and in my 20s, I've been in this limbo of being too old to play the young lead, and too young to play the 30, 35 - year - old. I've always had an older head on my shoulders because I've hung out with older people. I was in television shows with older actors, and when I was 15, 16, 17, I sat up in hotel lobby bars with older actors until the early hours of the morning hearing them tell stories. I've always been drawn to older characters and I've always struggled to get into the younger roles. It feels good to be finally getting to an age where I'm playing my age.

My first experiences with fashion were dressing up. It was always about fantasy for me. Dressing up as characters . . . I always thought that's what clothes were - that they would make you into the person you wanted to be. I'm an actress, so I love to act, and I think that's one of the most important things - the thing that makes you feel like another person.

I've tried most of my career to transform myself towards characters.

I really become the characters when I'm writing them. I'll become one or two of them more than others, I'm consistent that way.

I look back at my career when I was younger and can connect what I was going through at the time with the characters I was playing. I see the similarities in them reflecting on my life.

Movies are a powerful medium. People think you are your character. I've had plenty of people who think I'm Drago. They don't know about the chemical engineering part of my personality. They don't know about the geek part of my personality.

Once you do a character in Hollywood and people haven't seen you before, they put you in a box and they think that's all that you can do and it's hard to get people to take a risk on you.

In Bergman's world I represented a sort of intellectual, skeptical, ironic person, rather cold and frustrated. When I went abroad and made films in Italy and other places, I was used in different ways. I was rather often cast as crazy people, maniacs. It was very good for me and it was fun because it is nice to play crazy people if you are not in reality. And I think perhaps that changed how Ingmar saw me. Suddenly I was on the more magical side of his world, playing the people with fantasies, variety, the artists.

The actors I looked up to when I was a teenager, they all just disappeared into different characters.

People watch me when I get into these characters that I have in my head, so perhaps I should try acting. So I did.

It's fun to play characters in songs. I can just cheat a little bit... be this person for just a small amount of time and just help vent that idea.

There are definitely things about acting that have helped me growing up and finding myself, but there are also things that make it a bit more difficult. I guess I do allow myself to explore more when I know that, at the end of the day, if I really wanted to, I could just play a different person all day and be fine with that.

The first five years of my career, I was Inmate #1, Bad Guy #1 and Mean Guy #1. I had a great career going, until somebody told me that I was typecast. I said, "Well, what's typecast?" And they said, "Well, you're always playing the mean Chicano dude with tattoos." I thought about that and I said, "Wait a minute! I am the mean Chicano dude with tattoos, so somebody is getting it right."