Tom Bateman Quotes

I want to be the best actor that I can be; I want to be working in this business absolutely, and if that means being a movie star, then OK, that's fine. But to me, movie star, celebrity, all that stuff means something very different than being an actor.

When you're 20 and you're in acting school and your teachers tell you that 95 percent of actors are unemployed for twenty years, you think it doesn't apply to you. But it does take twenty years to become real, because that's what you have to do to be an interesting actor.

Most young actors, that's all they're trying to do: Get better at acting and be able to keep doing it. And that doesn't work out for most people.

I was a guy who needed to go to class, because I had some raw talent that I thought was identifiable, when I finally made a decision to be an actor. And yet I wanted to learn how to really do the stuff. You know, 'How do I get to be a serious actor?'

Once the second season of 'Haven' rolled around, I really started to attack this acting thing and finally admitted, 'OK, I'm an actor now. This is what I'm doing. This is my new career.'

I don't think I can call myself an actress yet. I just don't think my skill level is that high. I hope that with every job it gets better. But until I'm good, I can say I'm trying to be an actor, but I don't think I've completely made it.

There are definitely roles within this industry that are industry-related, but to be a good actor, you really have to want to act first. At the same time, my goal was never to go to Hollywood to make movies. I think if you come here with that attitude, then you've missed a few steps.

A lot of people are surprised to hear that an actor studied for two or three years. They take the craft for granted and wanna just wake up and be an actor.

Anytime I met an actor, I just attacked them and said, 'How did you do this?' Eventually, I began to realize that you went to school for it. I wasn't a bright kid, so it took me a long time to figure that out.

My job isn't about pursuing fame and then becoming an actor. It's about becoming an actor, and if fame follows suit, that's fine.

Decide very early on: do you want to be an actor or do you want to be famous? Because they're very different routes.

I want to keep on progressing. I definitely think acting is a long process to be one of the greats like Morgan Freeman or Jack Nicholson.

I always wanted to be a good actress and a serious actress. I wasn't in the profession to, quote-unquote, meet the stars.

I had agents in Australia; I just never had any auditions. And if you can't audition, then you can't work. I studied there. I did classes there. I learned how to act. Growing up there, I discovered my love for acting, but I just wasn't getting the opportunities to work professionally.

I remember being a teenager and saying, 'Oh, I want to be an actress when I grow up.' And people saying, 'You need to be a good liar - are you a good liar?'

I feel that I have grown so much as an actor being on 'Homeland.'

I've always been in school plays and performing monologues and taking drama. Now I'm in acting classes. I do it the real way. I want to be a working actor. I would love that. I just like being on a series and having a script, and I want that to be my nine-to-five.

I became an actor, and because I had success as an actor, I became famous. I was acting for quite a while before I got famous; television made me famous. I guess that it's television that is responsible for everybody's desire to be famous.

I just want to keep acting and better my craft and see how far it goes.

And my father, being a good Swiss puritan, always really insisted that if I was going to be an actor, I shouldn't just be an actor, I should know about the whole process.

The actors I respect are the ones who see it as a career and manage to live reasonably normal lives, like Meryl Streep and Philip Seymour Hoffman.

When I initially started acting, all I wanted to do was to be in one movie. That's it. That was my goal.

My belief is that if I can achieve that level of entertainment by making the audience happy or sad or angry, then I have succeeded as an actor and have done my job. The profits and the fame as an actor will eventually surface, but first and foremost comes the work as an actor.

Most actors nowadays are models turned actors. That's why a lot of young actors are terrible. You have to learn how to act. It is not something that you can just do.

I spent so long studying really hard to become a fine actor, but threw it all away because I got the adulation and the fame so easily.