Lennie James Quotes

In 2000, I realized I had reached that certain age when the parts get scarcer. So I decided to try my hand at directing.

I always wanted to be a doctor and go to art school, but I thought I'd regret it if I didn't act.

I wanted to be a lawyer. I realized I don't really want to be a lawyer. I want to play a lawyer. Thank God I figured that out.

Eventually, I went to college to study psychology, but I was getting more and more TV roles, so I thought, 'You know? It's kind of like psychology, but a little more selfish.' I took a break from school, moved to L.A., and never went back.

A month before I booked 'This Is Us,' I was like, 'Maybe I should move to Montreal and work in a coffee shop.'

At 17, I realized that it's going to be a tough decision to make, but I had the clarity of thought to walk out of cricket and try my luck in acting.

I graduated high school a year early and moved to Los Angeles to go to acting school, which is hilarious.

I was the laziest person around. Suddenly, one day, I decided to become an actor. Thank God for that whimsical decision: else, by now, I'd have been a 140-kilo, butter-chicken-bingeing hotelier.

I think it's probably safe to say that continuing our onscreen relationship in front of the camera is probably not happening. I expect Adam may well pursue things in front of the camera, but I'm most likely not. It's not who I am.

Music is what I always dreamed of doing. But at a certain point in my career, they convinced me to act, and that started me acting.

My father was a television director and producer, working on documentaries and current affairs programmes including 'Panorama,' and I didn't think he'd find acting a sensible option. But as soon as I'd finished my A-levels, I got on a train to Edinburgh, and that was it.

I decided during my teens that I wasn't going to have the life of a concert pianist, much to the chagrin of a lot of people who had put a lot of money into me!

I had aspirations to do different things with my life. I wanted to play soccer. I wanted to be a lawyer. Serendipity.

I didn't intend to be an actress. It was one of many things I was interested in, and it just took off. I was an actress between the ages of 18 and 22, and it was a wonderful, fun thing to do, but it wasn't what I intended long term. I parked acting a long time ago.

I like to work. I mean, part of it for me is that I was a struggling actor, could barely pay my rent, until I was almost 40.

I think, as a kid, whenever you say you want to be an actor, you get discouraged, so perhaps if I had have listened to those people telling me that, I might have gone down the route of a teacher. But I was never really going to do that.

I think I've made some choices that maybe I wasn't so sure about for some reason or another. But I'm one of the lucky ones. Even when I was young, I played Bird, and that's a role people wait for their whole lifetime.

My second or third year in the engineering department, I got very frustrated, and I sat down with myself and had a soul-searching conversation with myself and said, 'What I'd really like to do is see if I can write comedy.' ... I moved to L.A. stone cold. Didn't know anybody; didn't know how to go about it. Really started from scratch.

There's nobody in the arts in my family. It was kind of embarrassing to even say that I wanted to be an actor.

I was anxious before I decided to go back to acting about what I wanted to do with my life. Once I realized I was sort of interested in acting, I've been pretty lucky and had all these great parts. And I feel pretty much like, 'What will happen will happen.'

I dropped out of college before graduation. I opted to begin work as an actress.

I don't think, because I'm going to school for something else, that I will stop being an actress.

It requires a lot of courage for someone to cast me in something else. I am just hoping that someone sees something else in me other than comedy.

The first thing I wanted to be growing up was a solicitor, because all the people around me needed solicitors! But I never really followed it up. Then I wanted to be a dessert chef because I liked the presentation.

I never wanted to be an engineer.