Jessica Chastain Quotes

The scripts don't come pouring in; I have to fight for every part.

I actually love auditioning because I usually don't get the part. I've tested with Daniel Day-Lewis, Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Tom Cruise. So I've gotten to that point, and I understand when I don't get it. There are a lot of very talented people out there.

Once you've gotten the job, there's nothing to it. If you're an actor, you're an actor. Doing it is not the hard part. The hard part is getting to do it.

The 12 years that I was improvising are why I got the number of commercials I got when I was in New York and why I got 'The Devil Wears Prada,' and it's why I even got in the door for 'Mad Men.'

I'm striving toward this acting thing. I'm definitely gonna work hard on that, whatever comes my way, I'm gonna work hard on it.

Ninety percent of my roles, I've had to fight for. It's only a really small percentage of people who get handed roles.

You have to keep persevering. An actor goes to a lot of auditions and doesn't get the part.

It is not easy for a dancer to be accepted as an actor. But I worked my way up through hard work and by God's grace.

Acting is a tough business, but if you really want to do it, you should go full force.

I had heard about how people struggle and how hard it is to get into acting. But I did not care because it's something I love.

When I moved to Los Angeles, I was straight out of grad school, and I didn't have a single credit to my name. I knew one person in town - another actor whose name is John Billingsley. I just had to audition and audition and audition. I was plugging away for 15 years. So I earned my stripes!

I started auditioning when I was about 10 and I didn't get my first job until I was 12, and two years at that age is really hard.

I've now been doing this for ten years, and I actually got to skip a stage of going to casting directors, and now I meet with the directors, either for lunch or an audition room, and I still read sides; you're never going to get around that, but I'm not the best person to go on an audition.

I haven't been in a position to have the luxury to pick roles for most of my career, so I'm not practiced in that. Usually, when you want to be an actor, you take whatever comes along. If there's an audition, you go for it. If you get the job, you do it - just to get experience, to act, to meet people.

I consider myself a fortunate working actor, but I really work at it all the time. If I have a couple of weeks off, I'm taking class. You never stop. I started when I was 10 years old in Cleveland, and I've never stopped working my butt off.

If I had any advice for my 16-year-old self, it would just be to stay strong, because acting is not an easy lifestyle, especially when you are starting out. That being said, it definitely makes it all worth it when it does happen.

There are actors who spend 20 years working and still don't achieve what I've achieved so quickly. So I think my only course of action is to work as hard as I can, not just for the sake of the film, but also to prove to these people that I do have talent.

I still audition a lot and work really hard to get work. So I don't really walk around feeling like I've made it. My short term goals are really just to be creatively stimulated and to be excited about material I might be working on.

I feel like people who come out to Los Angeles hoping to be an actor give up too easily, and/or they don't put in the amount of time that it really does take.

My advice for upcoming actors is to never give up. If it's in you, keep following your dream no matter what. Perseverence is the key.

It's not like they just open the gate to Hollywood and off you go - you earn your stripes. I worked ferociously hard even just to get an agent.

I wasn't one of the ones voted most likely to succeed when I was at drama school, but I persevered and concentrated on the acting rather than going to the right parties and getting the right agent. Eventually, after ten years, it paid off.

The day I can't walk is the day I quit movies.

I particularly want more acting. I've been auditioning a lot, and I definitely want to act.

You still really fight for good parts. It never stops. It's never a breeze. The people at the top of their game work as hard as the people at the bottom.