Rachel McAdams Quotes

I loved being on stage. I was in elementary school when I started, so I couldn't say that it was about the building of characters.

When I was 15, I was asked to do 'Cyrano de Bergerac' at school, and it fundamentally changed my life. It's obviously an extraordinarily diverse and potentially electrifying part. It's a big leading part, and I hadn't really played anything like that before; I was the one doing the comedy side bit.

I never did drama in high school or anything like that. I just kind of fell into it after college, and I pursued it on my own.

And it was the idea that you can do a play - like a Shakespeare play, or any well-written play, Arthur Miller, whatever - and say things you could never imagine saying, never imagine thinking in your own life.

I've got no need to prove to myself that I can do Shakespeare. I've done it.

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.

Watching and learning from the great Josette Bushell-Mingo, who was playing Cleopatra in Antony and Cleopatra at the time, and then to return to the same stage six months later playing a lead role, was incredible - I fell in love with the poetry and the breadth of the language so much that I didn't want it to end.

I did the plays in middle school. I was cast as a gate in my fourth grade play, and every year I got a bigger role. Then, in 7th grade, I played Smike in 'Nicholas Nickleby,' and the casting director saw me and asked me to audition for a movie. That movie led to me getting 'Moonrise Kingdom.'

I started doing musicals, but the acting bug bit when I did a four-week Shakespeare workshop.

I was very interested in acting as a kid. I loved to perform.

I have been acting since I was thirteen.

I've got all these great broads in me, all these character women. I was playing a torn-down stripper at twenty-five on Broadway, and now I fit the shoes.

It was a wonderful experience to live the life for a year; to spend all day doing Shakespeare and then do a play in the evening.

I think some people in their 20s really get it, that acting is about creativity and the work. They get their maturity from their work.

I got into musical comedy because of Shakespeare, not because of singing. They needed someone to understudy Richard Burton. I was also going to musical auditions because the agent I had insisted I go to them.

I love acting because it's empowering. It empowers me.

I did a lot of serious plays, and I did the Oxford Review as well, which is supposed to be funny, but I'm not sure how funny we were when we did it. Then, when I finished my course, it was only then that I decided to go to drama school and try and do acting because I was enjoying it so much and so on.

I fell in love with acting. I thought, 'This is what I want to do.'

When I was in kindergarten, I had one line in a little play. I said, I am Patrick Potato and this is my cousin, Mrs. Tomato, and I heard laughter. I wanted to be an actress from that moment on.

I just enjoy acting, whatever area - theatre, film, television.

I would love to be remembered as one of the greatest Lears or Hamlets.

I like to spend as much time on the stage as possible. I don't do a regular TV series because I don't want to be overexposed.

When I saw Paul Scofield do 'Love's Labor's Lost at Stratford,' that's when I saw the potential of the level of truth that could go on up there on a stage. I said, 'This is what I want to do.'

I never wanted to go longer than five years off the stage. Not necessarily musicals, but just doing a play or something.

People always make that mistake when they talk about theatre - the notion of the 'theatrical' meaning something separate from life. If it doesn't relate to life, it doesn't relate to anything.