Eva Mendes Quotes

I studied acting in NYU's graduate program, in which we covered everything from Ibsen and Chekov to August Wilson and David Mamet.

I went to drama college in England - the Central School of Speech and Drama, in London. I was there for not quite two years, then I got Star Wars.

I first got into acting when I was about 12. I started doing speech and drama lessons. All my friends were doing it at the time and my dad encouraged it. He encouraged any extracurricular activity.

I'm a geeky actor, in the way that I like the craft of acting. I trained as a stage actor and was given a lot of technical tools to play with. I like the craft of acting. It sounds geeky when I say it, but it's true.

I always liked performing. I always liked being in front of people. That's one of the things I loved about law; we had mock trials, and I got to go up and state my case. But I took an acting class, and after my first class, I was hooked.

No matter what, when you major in theater arts whether you want to write or be a director or design scenery or whatever, when you are a freshman at UCLA then - I guess it's still the same way - you had to take an acting class.

Acting is the least mysterious of all crafts. Whenever we want something from somebody or when we want to hide something or pretend, we're acting. Most people do it all day long.

What I've discovered is, really, acting is acting is acting. It's all the same. Seventy-five percent of the skills are the same in both media.

I want to get into the theater. I really wanted to be a theater director, but I turned out to be a movie director.

As a kid, I was fortunate that we grew up near a children's theater, with all different classes and things; so as a kid I took classes there and as I got into high school I did all the community theater stuff. Then I came to college here in New York, going to Marymount Manhattan, and studied acting there. But most of the training I got was from working. Working with really great people.

I never really took any acting classes. I'm just a natural ham, I guess.

All the craft skills that I have, I feel like I developed and honed in drama school. It's the most important thing for me.

Plays have to be made, and we have to find a way to make them. All of us.

I regret not having enough training, I trained for a year at The Royal Court, but I very quickly went off to do films and television.

I loved getting classical training in terms of acting. I would've stayed in acting school for the rest of my life if I could have. It was this amazing period of my life where everything was so safe.

Take it from a director: if you get an actor that Sandy Meisner has trained, you've been blessed.

I've been acting for years and years, at prep school - school plays, that kind of thing. That was always very high on my agenda. I went to study English for two reasons. Principally because when I was in university, studying drama wasn't considered an option. You couldn't get a degree course for it. And so many plays and things that I was interested in landed themselves in a broader spectrum of literature.

I was always acting. I was doing after-school plays and stuff like that. But I wasn't doing well in any of the schools, so by ninth or tenth grade, I ended up going to a boarding school.

I enjoy working with writers and their scripts. It's very exciting to me. Eventually I would like to produce, direct and act onstage, but it's not a heavy pressure. When I do it, I want to do it well. I'm just educating myself with writers and scripts, because I didn't read a lot of books when I was growing up.

I don't know what acting is, but I enjoy it. I think we ask too many questions of ourselves. We make too much importance of stuff. But I do say to actors when I have taught in classes, or when I sometimes do a talk to a group. I'll say, “If I never acted again, the world wouldn't stop, nor would it stop if I didn't stop acting. That's how important it is. I know it [seems] important when you're young. But I say, “Lighten up. Don't take it all so seriously.” All the gurus and teachers will take your money and run.

What I've found is that stage is very much a foundation of acting. It's where it all began and you're working with that repetition.

Once I started taking drama classes, I asked myself why I had ever wasted so much time on a football team.

Acting is the use of human experience with talent added.

I just love the history of acting. It's such a beautiful craft and you absolutely get out of it what you put into it.

I like auditioning. I like working on material. I just love working.