Chris Lowell Quotes

I didn't really want to be an actor when I was growing up - I wanted to be whatever I was reading about or seeing at the time. When I read The Firm I wanted to be a lawyer; when I saw Top Gun, I wanted to be a fighter pilot. So that's why acting probably turned out to be a good thing for me because I get to be people for five minutes or 90 minutes. I'd be curious to see if I had the attention span to be like those guys on 30 Rock and play the same character season after season.

As a child I wanted to be everything from a doctor, lawyer, flight attendant to an IT pro- fessional and could never make up my mind. I figured as an actor I'd get to play all these professions.

As far as post-'SNL' career, whatever kind of comes my way that looks interesting, I'll do it, you know?

I remember when I was 12, talking with my friends about what we wanted to do with our lives, astronauts, forensic detectives, all these different jobs. And the only thing I could think was an actor.

I don't have an agenda where I do a comedy and say, 'I have to do a drama next,' or 'I am looking for an action movie now.'

I think I've had a fairly meandering career. Because I did start so young, I think that I've always chosen my parts based on what's interesting to me and what I think would be challenging or fun, or someone I've always wanted to work with or a place I've always wanted to work in or a topic.

In my fifth-grade yearbook - it's right up there on the top shell - the last page says, "What about your future?" and under my name, it says, "When I grow up, I would like to be either an actor, a radio announcer, an impersonator or a comedian."

I think I was about 16 when I first figured I wanted to be an actor. I wanted to be a fighter pilot before that, but then I thought I don't want to kill people so that ruled that out.

It's like being a little kid again, parading around in a nightgown tucked into your underpants, believing it looks terrific.

After Bottle Rocket, I started getting acting work. People started offering me roles in movies. It wasn't something that I thought about as a kid growing up in Texas. Actually, maybe I would have thought of it as a possibility, but it seemed so crazily far-fetched to think that you could work in movies that I really didn't ever quite imagine it. It was just lucky.

I think I'll always be a theater gypsy at heart.

Kids play pretend. I think that kids can be the best actors.

It's how you tell the story that makes it new. That's what artists do. They let us look at the world from a different perspective. They let us look at birds in a way that makes us never see birds again in the same way. That's why I don't think computers are healthy for kids. They're too literal. You pop a button and a bluebird comes out. You pop another button and you can take the color blue and shove it into the outline of the bluebird.

I think that people who can't believe in fairies aren't worth knowing.

Honestly, I think it's dumb luck that I'm able to kind of get away doing different types of films in different genres. There's always a tendency to kind of stick with what works, or stick with one particular kind of brand or movie. But so far I've been getting away with it, so I'm going to continue to do that for as long as I can.

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.

When I was a kid I loved to read, but I didn't write and I didn't create imaginary worlds. So, if one student walks away thinking, "She's obviously just an ordinary person, yet she gets to make her living doing what she wants to do. Maybe that applies to me, too," then I feel like my time has been well spent.

I think I've been really lucky to keep my career so varied, and to be open. There's safety in repetition, but there's also a trap there.

The reason I got into this business was for the privilege to exist in different genres and different worlds and play out different realities.

A lot of people think that kids say the darnedest things. But so would you if you had no education. You'd just be like, I am bike cheese. Because you wouldn't know what words were.

I'm sort of coming of age into a different time of acting, and I feel kind of like a kid again. I used to think that I could climb anything, do anything. But I've just been like a skinny white girl my whole life.

Kids are always honest, 'cause they don't think they're ever going to die.

I don't really enjoy working in TV, to be completely honest, even though it's incredibly lucrative, I'm just terrified of not being satiated in a myriad of different ways. It's amazing that I get to create every day, as an actor, or a director, or a writer, and I get to do it in a variety of different genres and worlds and characterizations. I think that's the great privilege of what we do, we get to make believe. I get to go to so many different places, try on different occupations, take on different points of view. That's what's always been sort of alluring.

I love motion-capture, because you're just free. It's like when you're a little kid, and you say, "Okay, we're the army men. We're going over the mountain." Or, in this case, "We're walking through the swamp" or "Walking through the casino." And it's just a blank room.

There's nothing wrong with making little kids happy, but there's nothing wrong with wanting to be an adult actress. I mean a grown-up actress.