Kevin Whately Quotes

Of all the things I do, acting is the thing that grabs most, but there's another level on which it strikes me as being a little silly. In the end you're dressing up and deciding to be somebody.

One of the things that makes you want to be an actor, speaking only for myself, is that there's something infantile about it. You're suspending disbelief, pretending and entering into a story world.

Sometimes you think about the job that we, as actors, do. I take it very seriously, and I care very much about it, but I'm paid to make believe. When you're a kid, you go to your friend's house, and it's, 'Let's pretend we're both cowboys!' Without belittling it, that's basically what I do - I tell stories.

It's funny how being an actor forces you to do things or go places that you wouldn't ordinarily.

One of the things I like about acting is that, in a funny way, I come back to myself.

Really I just want to get on with my job, which is to pretend to be lots of different people. Simple as that.

Acting's the best job there is. Pretending to be someone you're not is good fun. It's also a non-ageist profession, and you get to work all over the world with people you admire.

What drew me to acting in the first place was disguise.

I wanted to be an actor. That was my real goal. But I wasn't any good at it, so I wrote my own material and acted through that. That's my idea of fun. I get to be all these things in the songs.

I think that's so strange, because they do know that we're all actors and we perform things that have not necessarily anything to do with us personally.

Acting has always been such escapism for me.

A large part of acting is just pretending. You get to work with these other great make-believers, all making believe as hard as they can.

I mean, it's fine when you're a kid and someone runs into the playground and goes, 'I've got this great game of pretend,' and you play... As an actor, getting to play, getting to use your imagination and be childish - it is weird but it's wonderful.

We actors do this to pretend, to go into imaginary circumstances, so when the imaginary circumstance is of a different time, that just compounds the joy of doing what we do.

At a young age, acting was so inspiring and exciting, because to me it was play - make-believe, pretend.

I think that most actors, and they're a very strange lot actors, very strange people, but I think that they attempt to keep in touch with the child.

At first, being a storyteller, it was fun to dress up and fun to sing songs and pretend to be very dramatic - all of that stuff was just fun early on.

To a certain extent I suppose all actors are big kids.

I was the youngest child and really spoiled. I loved to play make-believe. I loved pretending to be all kinds of different people and it just seemed natural that I would go into acting.

Acting is a nice childish profession - pretending you're someone else and, at the same time, selling yourself.

The thing about being an actor is that you're in the business of not growing up.

I spent a lot of time on film sets with my dad at work, and as a kid, that's a very appealing thing, to watch grownups get to play dress-up and pretend that they're different people - and then get paid for it!

I always had a dramatic flair. I'd like to dress up like a cowboy, play make-believe. But I didn't realize acting was something I had to do until I got to college.

We are not brain surgeons. We are not curing cancer. We are not finding the next cure for Alzheimer's. We are simply and merely entertainment. We take on and wear the masks of characters. That's what we're paid to do.

One of my favourite games as a child was to dress up and improvise. Acting seemed obvious.