Joel McHale Quotes

I'd knocked on doors when I'd gone to theater school in Los Angeles the summer of my junior year, trying to find an agent and submitting headshots, but nobody would see me, and I knew it was virtually impossible to get an audition if you didn't have an agent.

Nowadays, kids... young actors... they go straight to L.A. before they've even done anything.

Los Angeles is where I became an actor.

I grew up in St. Louis, Missouri. I lived in Grand Blanc, Michigan for a year and that's when I got involved in acting and took classes there. A manager who saw me at the agency I was at in Michigan wanted me to come out to L.A.

I've been in the industry from the age of 9, so I have an agent. That's how you get auditions.

I got started acting by going to auditions that my mom found in the entertainment section of our local news paper. Then, I got a manager and started going out on more auditions.

I realized that the actors that I liked and admired all went to drama school and got an agent that way. So I started when I was about 16 in drama school, and then I knew I had to wait until I was 18 so I could go on auditions, and I tried to get into one of the ones that I liked and then go from there.

Even now, when people come up to me and say, 'My kid's an actor. They want to move to L.A. What should they do?' Even if you wanted to help them as much as possible, there's really nothing you can do.

I have an agent and everything. I audition occasionally.

Young actors often ask me how do you get an agent, how do you get started, how do you get to audition, and I don't know what to tell them because my story is so fluky.

In L.A., if you're an actor, your personal and professional lives are too intertwined.

My dad was a theater actor, so he had an agent, and he brought me into his agency when I was maybe four years old. That was how I started. I started modeling, and it progressed from there.

My father is an actor, so he brought me into his agency when I was young. It wasn't something I wanted to do until high school, when I started taking theater and really liked it. Then an agent found me and wanted me to come out to Los Angeles and give it a shot. I gave myself six months, but it only took me like a week to get a job.

I did everything pretty cliche as an actor in New York. I read the trades, I sent out 'head shots.'

I began auditioning for acting jobs at the ripe old age of 12. Thirty years later, including a 15-year run on television, I sometimes just get offers for work. Often, however, I am still required to run pell-mell around Los Angeles or New York, interviewing for film and TV jobs.

When I first moved out to Los Angeles I was thinking, you know, I wanted to be an actor but I didn't really know what acting was about. I thought if I could be a model, or even do commercials and stuff like that for the rest of my life, I'd be happy.

As an actor sometimes we sit and wait for projects to be handed to us and we don't really work. We expect our agents and managers to know who we are and to see who we are and offer us a part or send us out and submit us.

I moved here to California when I was 13 to pursue my acting career.

I came to L.A. to work and become a better actress, not to be a star.

I haven't really focused so much on getting acting work.

When I'm in Los Angeles, sometimes I hesitate saying that I'm an actor because people are like, 'Of course you are.' And I'm like 'No,' not, 'Of course I am.' In L.A., being an actor is like a pastime: everybody there is like, 'I was on this reality show; I'm an actor.' It becomes a word that is loosely thrown around.

When I was seven, I had been very vocal about wanting to be an actor. And my mom decided that we would try it out for a couple weeks and come to L.A. from Sacramento.

I came to New York in 1974, when I graduated from college. And you had to use 'Backstage' because all of the auditions were listed there. Most people didn't come with agents, so you got to see a lot of what was auditioning and when and where. 'Backstage' made sure you knew the major places.

When I moved out to L.A., I went on 156 auditions before I booked a single thing.

I've actually had a great career in Hollywood. I've been a working actor my whole life.