Stephen Root Quotes

People call me a movie star. If you're in the business, a movie star is someone who can make a film bankable. My name and $6 million will make a $6 million movie. I'm a working actor. Because I started late, I had a very short run as a leading man, and my films didn't make money in America.

I was fortunate enough to model, but it was always work for me. It was a way to support myself and finance acting classes.

Um, I think every role, whether in TV or film, has a part in building a career and relationships.

My journey has been that of a character actor.

My curiosity and my appetite for evolving as an actor is one of the main components of me still working today in the business.

I think it kind of took being a character actor to kind of now enter into leading ladies.

I guess my break in America came a little too early. It would've been nice to have a few more years to find out what I'm like as an actor without a camera on my face.

I have never struggled for anything in my life because I never thought I will be an actress. Film just walked up to my house with 'Abodh.'

When I started in films, it never really occurred to me that I could make a career out of acting.

I'd done about 10 movies before I decided I wanted to make acting the main thrust of my career.

I started off as an actor thinking that I would be this Romeo, this dashing leading man. It turns out that I'm a character actor.

For me, personally, I'm a 5'5" leading man. I'm no Brad Pitt or anything.

I didn't really want to act. Gerard Depardieu discovered me when I was 14 and asked if I wanted to make movies and I said, 'Why not?'

It wasn't until I did 'Hugo' where I sort of started to think that this could be something that I do for a long time - not necessarily the rest of my life, but we'll see.

As a child, I always wanted to be an actor. But as I grew older, the acting dream kind of faded away, and I took to studying a lot. A few years later, a relative of mine who really wanted me to try my hand at acting sent my photographs to a few production houses, and like they say, the rest is history.

I just wanted to be a working character actor.

I was born a character actor. I was never really a leading man type.

I'm not a leading man. I'm a character actor. That's what I want to be.

When I started in the business, you did television, and then when you got lucky, you got a prestige project of a film.

I actually never wanted to be a VJ. Never. It just so happened that I became a VJ, and I was actually kind of like, 'I don't want to be a VJ. I want to be in the movies.' So yeah, I always wanted to be an actor.

Everyone's amazed by the question that how did I succeed as an actor in the industry, which has Kamal Haasan? It's because I grew as an actor watching Kamal's acting.

'Guest Iin London' didn't work, but it got me more work; it helped me grow as an actor.

I can never forget my first film - it was instrumental in me becoming an actor.

After 'Dum Laga Ke Haisha,' I didn't know which way my life will head because my debut was with a very unconventional role.

I never planned to act in Malayalam. 'Yakshiyum Njanum' just happened and everything else just followed.