Allison Tolman Quotes

A lot of the time, in the past, I have played the pretty blonde in a lot of roles.

It can be difficult to get cast as something that is off-center from you, and my biggest fear is to be typecast.

In fact, I'll be taking a lot of Cathy Gale with me. I expect that was why I was chosen for the part.

I think you get the parts that people are comfortable with seeing you play.

There are elements of me in the roles I've played in the past. But people forget that Mary Poppins was just a role, too.

I've done bit parts on shows where I've been the fat girl or the punk rocker.

There is a very thin line when a man plays woman. If you're not careful, you may end up looking like a eunuch. If you don't enact your role properly, you can look very bad.

For me, playing a mother was a point of resistance; the question of 'will I get typecast' was going on in my mind.

I'd much rather play the psycho than the pretty girl in hot pants.

I once literally had a casting director ask my agent, 'Can she play anything other than a drunk?'

I'm not a personality actress. I never have been. I have been a character actress.

For most of my career, I've played roles that were written for other actresses.

If someone plays a brooding actor in a film, people think they're brooding all the time.

I never get the tall, blonde, glamorous roles because I'm not tall, blonde and glamorous. I'm more the wee, disturbing characters because of the way I look or sound.

All of us have a lot of sides to ourselves, but the fun thing about being actor is you make one side predominant for the character you're playing.

My looks haven't prevented me from playing prostitutes or people broken by life. But when they need a token blonde with big breasts, that's OK, too. It's part of the game.

I never played the 'decoration,' I always played the one who suffered. And then I got very lucky in my middle career, when I started playing the hero, which at that point was quite rare for women.

I used to play a lot of foreign women in my youth because I was prettier then. I would go for interviews, and directors would look at these sultry, exotic looks, hear this clipped accent and think the two don't go together. So they would give me a foreign accent.

I don't get called very often to play innocents.

It'd be very difficult to cast me as a ballet dancer. Everybody is, in some sense, controlled by their size and their gender. I'm not going to be allowed to play the part that Denzel Washington plays.

I think of myself as a character actor, compared to a straight actor. I know a character actor in England is pretty much the same as in the States; you're actually hired to put on terrible teeth and stuff like that.

With modelling, you provide an image that is fake; with acting you have to provide an image that's real.

As an actor, you get to sort of bounce back and forth in terms of the age range you play and the life experience that your characters have.

I play a lot of hard men and gangsters, and I'm not like that at all.

I do all kinds of roles - nerd, psycho, nerd, psycho, nerd, psycho - and occasionally someone kind of normal. It's weird, when I lived in Austin I was always cast as pretty normal people. But when I moved to Los Angeles I was immediately branded a psycho.