Rich Sommer Quotes

Hmm, limelight... No, I'm not Sienna Miller or Angelina Jolie. I'm very lucky and happy, but I still find it very difficult to get good scripts and good roles. It's really a jungle out there.

I did the whole struggling actor thing and lucked into being in the right place at the right time and getting involved in the first 'High School Musical.'

I think when you're a bigger star you get many good scripts sent to you, and you have to choose which one you're going to gravitate toward, but I just try to gravitate toward the best-written one that's been thrown my way after a lot of girls have passed on it.

I'm always struck by the kids who turn up in New York and LA, and places in between. Chicago. Wanting to do theater, wanting to do independent film. Wanting to break into television or radio.

The Professional Children's School, it's for professional kids, so if you wanted to ditch, you could just write, Audition on a note and leave. I didn't really like school all that much.

It's nice to have a little bit of action in your world. Sometimes us actors go a couple months without working, it gets a little crazy. It's good to be busy.

I was terrible in my first play. After that experience, I had to face that I wasn't good enough to play with the big boys. I had to go away and learn, so I worked in regional theater for three years. I even understudied at the Kennedy Center.

You can ruin your life wanting to be an actor.

When I saw my first Broadway show, 'Beauty and the Beast,' I was like, 'Okay, I'm definitely gonna do this.' After that, I did little shows and started auditioning.

Acting is a tough industry. There are a lot of kids out there at drama schools and not a lot of money about, especially as the arts are being cut.

When I went back to New York with somewhat of a name, they didn't want movie actresses.

Everything has combined to make my life in New York an amazing experience. I told my manager a few years ago that I wanted to move here and try acting in the theater.

I actually got a play from auditioning for something in 'Back Stage' magazine.

I don't often get recognized for my work, but I look familiar. I'm just a working-man actor. I go and audition, and you just hope the work keeps coming.

Of course I wanted an agent from the time I was like 5, but my mother was like, 'No, you're going to be normal, you're going to go to school, you're going to get good grades, you're going to play soccer, and if you do well, if you keep your grades up, you can do one community-theater show a year.'

Well, I'll keep on auditioning and one day maybe I'll go to LA and try out for films there.

The work that I've gotten in the hiatuses seems to indicate that I will have a little more work after 'Mad Men' than I did when I was scraping by while I was temping in New York, but who knows? People very easily could be like, 'Meh, we're done with that. We've got Jon Hamm. We're good without the weird one with glasses.'

Before 'Mad Men,' I definitely had very dry spells and I know what those feel like, and I don't think that ever leaves you as an actor.

I think as working actors, it's like sales. You're only as good as your last sale, so you put your all into something and you just hope that from that you can get your next job.

I began auditioning for acting jobs at the ripe old age of 12. Thirty years later, including a 15-year run on television, I sometimes just get offers for work. Often, however, I am still required to run pell-mell around Los Angeles or New York, interviewing for film and TV jobs.

I've been doing this for seven and a half years. I've been just bustin' it, trying to break in as an artist in this business. For me, it's still just about the work. I get the scripts and I'm all about that. I don't really even have an idea what that's going to be like.

You suffer as an actor. It's difficult to be an actor and live a good life, especially today.

I'd go for parts that didn't pay a dime, and there would be 300 to 400 actors there. It could be very discouraging. To make it in this business, you have to have a kind of dumb sense that you're really good. You have to believe that someone is going to recognize that.

I'm never offered any sort of roles. I need to audition in a typically lengthy process to receive roles.

Seems to me that this business, for actors anyway, is not so much about whether or not you do good work. It's about whether or not you get the chance to do good work.