I really think that everybody would like to be an actor. Why wouldn't they? It's great work if you can get it. The one thing that prevents most people from saying, 'I'm just gonna go to Hollywood!' is that it seems unrealistic.
Dreaming about being an actress, is more exciting then being one.
A lot of people are attracted to the acting profession because they think it's a cheap, easy, free ride. It really isn't.
It's the weirdest thing. When you go into acting, you expect to be a huge star and to be recognized... It did happen, but not in the way you expect it to... In L.A., I'm just another character actor.
I can't say I don't like acting, but I can't imagine a career when I have to spend 70 percent of my time in a trailer eating Snickers bars.
I talk about acting to students making the transition from high school to UCLA. Kids going into this profession really need to know the reality of it.
I've played a mother before, but it's always been a very young child, which is closer to what I can imagine my own life looking like.
I didn't want people to think I'm just in the movies, where you make money and wait around for 13 hours before you get to do 20 minutes of work.
When you're a kid, you imagine acting to be singing and fighting and like the movies. Then you become an actor and get the reality, which is often a lot more mundane. But sometimes it's really nice to run around with guns saving the world.
I want to open an eye or two about what being an actor is really like because it's not all red carpets and photo shoots. It's like trying to get that job and going from job to job.
People say, "Why is it that you love to act?" And you want to say, "Well, most of acting is sitting in your trailer, either bored or worried about the scene coming up." A lot of it is about things you don't really like, so it's a wonder why acting is such a huge draw, why everyone loves it so much.
As an actor, the only thing we can do is play the truth at that moment. Because at any point in time if you play the future, or you play that you know something that the audience does not know, it kills the illusion of reality.
I think a lot of kids I've met in L.A. trying to act want to escape working long days and think acting is all photoshoots and red carpets.
When I first started acting, I had all these ideals about the kinds of roles I wanted to play, but the reality is that when you do television - and I do a lot of television - you get cast for qualities that you have as a person. So I look for qualities that I like to portray.
As actors, we are expected to come up with an exaggerated performance, which is far from reality.
I always thought acting was all lights, camera, action. It's a job; you have to do your job correctly.
The hardest part of acting is not when I'm acting, It's when I'm not.
The thing is, even if you're playing sort of a heightened character and playing inside sort of a heightened reality, you can still apply your own truths to those characters.
I've never had any illusions about being a lead actor in films, because lead actors have to be of a certain kind.
People have this belief that actors are able to go out there and say, 'Oh I choose this job,' but most of the time we're just taking the job we can get. We don't just get offered thousands of jobs; we might earn one job a year and that's the one we'll take because we've got to pay the rent.
The best thing I ever learned when I first started acting is that you audition, and then you forget about it when you walk out the door. Even when you have a callback, you can't bank on things until you actually book that job, or your heart will just be broken over and over again.
Acting is not glamorous. It's not. Anybody who wants to get into acting for the glamour is in for a hard time.
The way that actors talk about acting is generally quite punishing, and I think actors want to put forward the idea that they do all of this work because, you know, it's a post-De Niro world, when, largely, in fact, it's almost never true.
I thought I was going to be a theater actor. I moved to New York after college and did some plays and worked a lot. Once the realities of living as a theatrical actor hit me, I realized I wanted to start making a little bit of money and not have to bartend and work in theater.
As an actor you have to have a strong vivid imagination as you're working and when the camera's rolling, but there's certainly a part of you that is aware of real life, that you're making a movie.
