Leigh Whannell Quotes

With acting, I always felt like I didn't have control of it. It was all about other people giving me a job.

The problem with acting is that there's really no control. You're at the behest of others.

Most actors and actresses are performative as people. It goes part and parcel with the profession and New York actors who are out of work, or actors anywhere out of work, are manic because you never know when the next job is going to come.

The actor is in the hands of a lot of other people, over which he has no control.

It's either feast or famine, and that's the way it's been for as long as I can remember. I've spent my whole career thinking I'll never work again. Every actor lives with that insecurity. You just have to negotiate the rapids as they come.

As actors, we're like these vagabond artists: we have to be invited to perform, so if you don't have a choice of options, it's very hard to define yourself.

Even the greatest actors have had dry spells where they've wondered if they were going to work again.

It's always possible as an actress that your last job could really be your last job.

A little secret about actors is that we never think we do a great job in auditions. We kind of just go in and do our work and leave sort of hoping for the best. It's an interesting dynamic - acting is such an interesting job. You never quite know how well you do.

With kiting, you have to land a trick, and in that instant you know whether you won or lost - I knew I could become the best in the world if I trained. But with acting, there are different variations; there's not a right or wrong way. It's so hard because it's so out of your hands. I have no idea what's going to happen!

Every year in Edinburgh, I end up waiting behind the curtain about to go on stage, and I have a moment of thinking, 'No one's told me what to do with this show. I've done exactly what I wanted. This is the biggest arts festival in the world, and all these people have shown up. Aren't I lucky?' It really is amazing.

As an actor, you always feel like you're not going to work again. You're always unsure about how things are going to work out, and you start thinking you're going to just fade off into the distance.

As an actor, one is so appreciative when one is working. I think I am lucky that I have the opportunity to work having that total dependence on an external validation.

What's frustrating as an actor, when you want to work hard, you can only work once that phone rings and then you can only work until the production wraps. Then you have to find another job.

Actors tend to get in their own way, a lot. A lot of times you will do things that will screw up your audition process. I was very bad at auditioning, and I always went in to it saying ‘God I hope I don’t screw this up.’ But at the same time, the directors are saying, ‘God, I hope this person is the savior.’ You have to remember is that the worst thing that could happen is you don’t get the job you don’t already have.

In filming you're waiting. You're waiting for lights. You're waiting for people set things up. And when you're not waiting, you're repeating. And neither is conducive to spontaneity, you know. Comedy makes you very, very neurotic because you think, I - but did I nail it?

As an actor, no matter what, you're at the whim of so many other people all the time.

Most people with good jobs, middle-class occupations, what have you, are only one pitfall away from social embarrassment and destitution. It's so precarious. Even salaried people in the West now feel this sense of being trapped, not having the freedom to strike out.

You just have to work really hard to tune out the noise and the static. Because it gets louder, and people really have an opinion, and you don't want to shy away from taking chances for fear of what people will say, or living in the wreckage of the future [of] what may be if I do this.

If you start acting and you start thinking about and worrying about what other people are going to say about it, you'll never really fully commit to who it is and what it is that you're playing.

It's easy to question yourself and ask if you're doing a good job, but there are so many different factors to landing a role. I remind myself that a lot of it is completely out of my control.

People often find it surprising that actors find photo shoots difficult, because you're very concerned about what's going on externally in those things when you have to be concerned with what's going on internally as an actor.

I think the reason I was able to get the jobs I did is because I worked for some very strong, self-possessed filmmakers who wouldn't listen to the executive-suited wisdom, and they believed in me from director to actor. Not from salesman to commodity.

All professionals, whether physicists, economists or musicians, live by and for peer judgment, even when they are being paid by people who cannot tell the difference.

but can everyone simply choose the path he loves? someone has to take the ordinary jobs. all i know is, that worked for me. and it didn't work for other people i know to get a so-called safe job, because there's no such thing anymore. the only thing that stays constant is the idea that people have to escape.