Andre Holland Quotes

I grew up with it. As a young actor, I was always aware of the brilliant work of Shakespeare. We studied Romeo & Juliet and Macbeth in school. As a young actor, you're always mystified and intrigued by such brilliant work. To actually have the chance to be involved in this production was a wonderful thing for me.

There is a lot of hype about drama school, I think. If you're an actor in England, that's just the way to get into it but I've been so incredibly lucky in that I was brought up in to it. I still might go to drama school, if I wanted to do theater work, definitely. It's a completely different type of training.

Young screenwriters are always very frustrated when they talk to me. They say, 'How do we get to be a screenwriter?' I say, 'You know what you do? I'll tell you the secret, it's easy: Read 'Hamlet.' You know? Then read it again, and read it again, and read it until you understand it. Read 'King Lear,' and then read 'Othello.'

I've played Lear three times, I would love to do it again.

I come from a little bit of a theatrical background. I started that way. I don't have a tremendous body of work or anything, but I went to drama school. And so, to get to do a piece where the characters get to talk a lot, and that isn't just about the spectacle or the set piece, or is simply visual or movement based. It was really wonderful for me, and juicy and exciting.

I really like Shakespeare a lot. The characters that he writes for females, I think, are really great and a lot more compelling than what modern writers write, which is weird because they didn't have actresses then.

I did lots of Shakespeare and classics, and I just kind of became that person. I was a bit of a snob.

It's an intuitive exercise to do a Shakespeare play and to go through a Shakespeare play.

A solid theatrical education can only improve a screen performance. It gives you a fuller capacity to read a script and understand a character, for one thing. It's important to alternate between the two activities.

I'm a pro! No, what I mean is I have performed with the Royal Shakespeare Company in England. I have been all over the place. I have studied theatre for seven years.

Shakespeare is rich and beautiful, and it can be an amazing experience to read and to watch and to work on.

I'd always dabbled in acting.

After drama school I did a seven-month tour of Europe performing in 'Romeo and Juliet.' I played Romeo.

I have been doing acting my whole life. I did plays in high school. I take it pretty seriously. I used to do a lot of Shakespeare and Shakespearean festivals and monologues.

With Shakespeare, because you invest so much time in working on material, it always sort of stays with you to some degree.

James Agate, a great critic of the day, advised me that the way to learn your job properly was to learn Shakespeare, so I went to Stratford. It really sorts out the men from the boys.

I just love performing so much, and I threw myself into every musical theater production that was going in my home town and at school. And then, I went to the National Youth Music Theatre, which was really a galvanizing experience for me when I was 17.

When I started in the theater, I'd do plays by Shakespeare or Ibsen or Chekhov, and they all created great women's roles.

I went to a performing arts high school, we learned Shakespeare, I did 'Fences.' When you train, you can do anything.

The single most important thing in learning my craft was being on the stage.

Although I have been doing plays since I was 8 years old, it was only when I started doing Shakespeare at age 19 at the Georgia Shakespeare Festival that I felt like my career started.

You learn to act by acting. You only get so much from acting class. You have to put your act on stage.

We studied so much Shakespeare in drama school and I'd like to go back to that. I'd really throw myself into something that would probably petrify me. Tennessee Williams. Something juicy.

I've done two 'Hamlets,' two 'Lears,' three 'Midsummer Night's Dreams' - I've done most of these plays more than once, and every time I direct them, I learn things.

I guess some characters always remain the same, and Macbeth is one of them.