Maz Jobrani Quotes

I don't feel like I properly started acting until I did my first play, 'Tusk, Tusk.'

I love acting and really taking on another person, another life.

I don't think of myself as an actress. I still think I'm fannying around in my mum's front room.

Sometimes I think of movie acting as advanced pretend.

I think of myself as an actor. The duty of an actor is to be able to impersonate anything - a child, an old man, a tree, a chair, a woman.

Having done a lot of theater, I'm used to sustaining characters over long periods of time.

There's a tremendous amount to be gained from being a performer, and being an artist, and being an actor.

In school, I was Martha in 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?' I loved that.

That was the fun of acting, being a blank canvas you could transform into the character - Indian princess, 20s vamp, Mother Courage, Oxford don, 94-year-old wife.

Juilliard definitely emphasizes the theater. They don't train - at all really - for film acting. It's mostly process-oriented, pretty much for the stage.

I think by eighth grade I knew I wanted to be an actor. I'd done church plays and stuff, but my first actual acting class was in eighth grade. I was obsessed with it.

There is probably some great acting that goes on in movies from people who have never been on a stage, but if you are in for the long haul, you'd be missing an enormous part of what being an actor is if you're not part of theater.

The job of an actor is the same in all of them, really. I mean, you're just creating a character that you hope people will believe, so it doesn't make that much of a difference really.

I'll always be there because I'm a skilled professional actor. Whether or not I've any talent is beside the point.

I would like to do a musical, if I could find a cool one. A song-and-dance role is closer to me personally than other characters I play.

It just clicked that it was the next step for me; choreographing didn't interest me, and opening a studio wasn't a passion for me. I didn't know if I'd be very good at acting, but then my first scene in acting class... I just loved it.

I'm an actor and my job is to interpret.

I'm an actor, and I'm supposed to reflect real people.

For my part, I like live theater best when it's taut, concentrated and intimate.

I immerse myself right into my character whether or not I'm relating to people live as an actor on stage or whatever.

The actor should not play a part. Like the Aeolian harps that used to be hung in the trees to be played only by the breeze, the actor should be an instrument played upon by the character he depicts.

I play a crazy talk-show host, but that's not me. It's like an actor playing a role.

In reading plays, however, it should always be remembered that any play, however great, loses much when not seen in action.

My first acting class was taught by a little known playwright, David Mamet, who then cast me in my first play, opposite John Malkovich.

With acting, you have to become someone else. That's the fun part of it for me - to step outside of yourself and become a character. I guess being Jimmy Cliff is a little bit of a character, too.