Gugu Mbatha-Raw Quotes

As actors you don't want to have one label. You'd rather have seven.

It's the transformation that drives me. I want to do it all and never want to be boxed into something as a particular type or style. I never want people to think they know me. I hope to build a repertoire that one can look at and say, from to role to role, 'Was that Brian Tee?'

My main goal, when I started acting, was to show as much versatility as possible because I like playing diverse roles.

It gives me more breadth as an actor and as an artist to not be pigeonholed.

As an actor, it's up to you to show that you can do something else. For me, the interesting actors don't always go where you expect to find them.

One week you may be an actor, and the next week you had to be nimble enough to be a TV host. And the week after that, you might have to do some stand-up or be in an improv company or write and sing a song somewhere.

I think, for an actor, variety is the spice of life. They should do all kinds of roles, so I don't believe in limiting myself.

I think, as an artist, I wear a lot of different hats, and people have to join all of the dots.

My career has suddenly started to be the one that I'd always wanted, not in terms of level of success, but in terms of - and this is what I've been banging on about - playing different parts in different media. I was very frustrated, in a physical sense, by people seeing me in a way that I wasn't. And I was beginning to find myself boxed into a corner. Hopefully things have loosed up a bit, and I've gotten better and become more relaxed as an actor.

I'm very fortunate that I get asked to do very different kinds of roles and I realize how much I enjoy that. I enjoy the challenge of transformation. There are actors who play one character, or a certain kind of character, the whole of their lives. I really relish the opportunity to have the challenge to totally transform.

I have the appetite to do different roles that have different backdrops. I'd like to show that there's more to people sitting in cars for reasons other than being police officers.

I am one of those people who isn’t great at anything, but I’m pretty good at most things.

I love the chameleon nature of this business [acting]. I always have. Sometimes I'm not as recognizable as somebody else and I may not have gotten a role, but for me, acting is not a competition. I've just kept my head down and kept working, and had the great pleasure of working with some amazing people and playing some extraordinary and extreme characters.

The thing I love about acting is getting to change and look at different people in different lives and do different projects.

An actor is an impersonator; he plays many different roles. If you played the same role all the time, God that'd be a boring career.

The number one thing for me is diversity. I always want to ensure that people can't put me in a box. I can play a bad guy, I can play a good guy, I can play a good bad guy, I can be the host of a show, I can be serious, and I can be funny.

I feel like it's really important for an actor to play different roles so people can see, "Oh, he can play that guy or he can play this guy." You're not just "THAT guy," that cowboy guy, that whatever guy. Then you are limiting yourself.

I love doing roles and movies that are different from each other. That's kind of why I like to be an actor because I get to play different characters and pretend I'm different people going through different situations.

I've been very lucky at what's happened in my career to date, but playing something as far from me as possible is an ambition of mine - anything from a mutated baddy in a comic book action thriller, to a detective. If anything, I'd like Gary Oldman's career: he's the perfect example of it. I've love to have a really broad sweep of characters - to be able to do something edgy, surprising and unfashionable.

Pires has got something about him, he can go both ways depending on who's facing him

You are a devil at everything, and there is no kind of thing in the 'versal world but what you can turn your hand into.

I think doing shows with other R&B artists like myself brings the attention to the crowd. You can't just do those one artist shows anymore. I don't like just me being on the show.

That's the beauty of being an actress, is that you hopefully get to have different roles and really stretch yourself. This is really what I've been working for a while. I've been in the business for a minute, and it's an opportunity like this that I've been really working towards.

I don't care if people perceive me as always selling out because I'm doing a studio picture. For me, the whole thing is you should be diverse in your choices; that's the beauty of being an actor, you should be able to do that.

Actors have to remind people that they can do different things, not just the same style of one role.