Rosemarie DeWitt Quotes

Once I started working as a professional actor, it was like, 'Bye-bye waiting tables, bye-bye bartending, bye-bye all the cliched jobs actors do.' But after a year of not getting work, there's this really difficult conflict, like, 'Do I have to go back to being a waiter when people recognize me from a show?'

As an actor, it's hard to get work. Sometimes you have to make do with the jobs that you get.

Since it was too difficult to get into the Screen Actor's Guild in New York, I moved to Miami in 1982 and started a successful career as a television commercial actress, obtaining my SAG card there.

All of a sudden I'm an actor, and I spend a decade trying to fit in and realising that I didn't, really. Sometimes in the right circumstances, with the right people, it felt OK. But other times it was a bit more jobbing. I didn't fit the mould, somehow.

I'd knocked on doors when I'd gone to theater school in Los Angeles the summer of my junior year, trying to find an agent and submitting headshots, but nobody would see me, and I knew it was virtually impossible to get an audition if you didn't have an agent.

My father is an actor, so he brought me into his agency when I was young. It wasn't something I wanted to do until high school, when I started taking theater and really liked it. Then an agent found me and wanted me to come out to Los Angeles and give it a shot. I gave myself six months, but it only took me like a week to get a job.

I'm a grinding actor. That's how I've always viewed myself. You go from one job to the next.

Being an actor, you have to be working even when you're not working. You never really get to relax because anytime you're relaxing in between jobs, you're just worried that you're not going to get another job.

It can be tough as a jobbing actor.

I've only ever really been in shows of friends, so I don't know exactly what happened. I think I'm incredibly cheap to hire. That can buy some traction. I'm as cheap as it's possible for an actor to be legally.

It's so hard coming out of drama school to claim your right to be taken seriously and even get auditions.

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.'

I've been auditioning since I was 7 years old.

There's a cumulative effect to getting good parts as a freelance actor, because you're only as good as your last job, and you have to keep going out and getting them. Unless you're part of the finance structure, by which I mean a bankable star, which I never was and never will be.

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 live in Minnesota. Lots of people assume that if you want to be an actor, you have to live in Hollywood, but not me.

As a struggling actor, you're not looking for parts that define you; you're just looking for work.

Unless you have a long-running series, most actors just go job to job if you're lucky to keep working. You just do a movie or a play or a TV thing, and it's over at some point.

But it's hard to sustain a successful acting career today.

Basically, one of the hardest things about being an actor is getting your first break. I'm a product of nepotism. The doors were open to me. I'd done several movies before I decided what I wanted to do.

If you're a young actor, unless you're on a very short list at the studios, we have to be very creative about moving your career along. Otherwise, all we can do is hope to get lucky and find that perfect role that pops you into stardom.

When you start out acting, you dream of getting an agent and getting a job. For years, you audition and you get what you can. Choice isn't something that you have much of.

For a New York actor, there are two things you look forward to - getting your SAG card and being on 'Law and Order.'

I know how difficult it is for actors to get work, because I did casting for all those years.

When you start as an actor, you can only hope you'll be able to act at all - let alone on a show that lasts seven seasons.