Josh Pais Quotes

I love acting and really taking on another person, another life.

I don't sing as well as my mother. I'm a good actress. I'm not that good a singer.

I did a lot of musicals when I first started my career, so I can carry a tune well.

I never saw myself as a singer; I never really thought I had the voice for it.

But I'm tone deaf - window-shattering tone deaf. I can't sing for the life of me. I can't sing or dance, so no remake of 'Grease' for me!

I did Shakespeare in college, and the nerves I got doing Shakespeare are the same nerves I get doing 'Mad Men.' I want to get the dialogue just spot-on.

The worst thing you can do as a performer is to judge your character in any way, positively or negatively.

I would like to do a musical, if I could find a cool one. A song-and-dance role is closer to me personally than other characters I play.

There are a lot of singers who cannot sing to save their lives. We have to accept it, but thank God there is such a thing as live shows. It's only when people are faced with live shows that the world gets to know how good or how bad they are.

I've never acted, but I'm an entertainer. So I kind of used what I know from being onstage. I've done a thousand and two interviews, and I've been on camera a million times, so I'm not uncomfortable on camera, but it was interesting for me to be someone else.

There's a lot to be said for getting really comfortable in a character.

The goal, when you're playing a character that's super beloved from a movie, is to honor what the actor before you has done and then really just expand, which is what you get to do in a musical because you have songs, choreography, and everything is happening in real time.

I had been wanting to do a musical for a really long time. I wanted people in New York to know that I can sing.

I've always been a singer, but I don't know if I was always a natural performer.

Acting is the ability to dream on cue.

I've been able to perform in front of thousands of people on stage in a character that's nothing like me. I'm very shy.

An actor is an impersonator; he plays many different roles. If you played the same role all the time, God - that'd be a boring career. When you take on different roles and become a different person, that's called acting... It's a challenge.

I specifically remember doing the musical 'Sweet Charity' at Stagedoor. I was playing Vittorio Vidal, which is a very funny part, and some other small roles. I couldn't really sing that well, but there were so many fun bits, and I just remember the tremendous adrenaline rush I felt from being onstage and hearing the audience enjoying it.

All good actors are unpredictable, and a little crazy in a good way, because they feel more secure playing other people than themselves.

As a child I was taken to the pantomime or the theatre and I would always, always fall in love with somebody on the stage. And want to have sex with them.

Sometimes I think of movie acting as advanced pretend.

You can find a connection with any Shakespeare role you play.

I'm a character actor and I get lost in these characters, so I think it's only recently that people have begun to connect dots and go, 'Oh, that's the same person that did this, this, this, this and this!' which I take as a compliment. One time somebody called me an illusionist, and that was the nicest thing anyone has ever said.

I think of myself as an actor. The duty of an actor is to be able to impersonate anything - a child, an old man, a tree, a chair, a woman.

At the beginning of 'The Hills,' I couldn't watch myself because I'm very critical and would pick myself to pieces. But with movies I feel like it's different because you're playing a character. So it's like watching yourself but not watching yourself.