Quotes About Playing Roles

#1. More and more good actors are now transmigrating into the videogame space and playing roles there because it's where my generation of kids get stories from.

Andy Serkis

#2. I've always been good at pretending. At playing roles.

Anna Snoekstra

#3. I can't keep myself from playing roles. The emotionless decadent, looking for diversion from boredom, is a favorite.

Ellen Willis

#4. I don't want to be in a position where I'm playing roles I'm comfortable with and making money, but doing it without feeling like I'm growing.

Rodrigo Santoro

#5. Playing roles that are intense and damaged has always come more easily to me than doing comedies or lighter stuff - that would be taking a huge risk for me.

Sarah Polley

#6. Really, I was such a late bloomer, I really didn't learn how to be me until I was in my late '40s, which is when I started playing roles that were closer to me.

Ron Perlman

#7. I think novelists, when they write their books, end up having occasionally serving a purpose and playing roles that they never really fully either intended or even understood.

Khaled Hosseini

#8. I didn't understand that playing roles in any relationship is false and will inevitably lead to the relationship's collapse. No one can be any one thing all the time.

Portia De Rossi

#9. In Hollywood, you're always playing roles ... It's like going through the motions. But in real life, it's like, you gotta take care of business. It's not just the movies.

Mickey Rourke

#10. I've spent all my life playing roles that illustrious people have played before me.

Geraldine McEwan

#11. My goal is to just keep playing roles that are different from the roles I've played before.

Alicia Witt

#12. I've built a career in Asia for 18 years, playing roles that had nothing to do with my race because everybody's Chinese in the films.

Daniel Wu

#13. I love playing roles that are physical, absolutely love. Whether it's just that kind of basic level of physicality or whether it's stunts.

Ellen Page

#14. I'm naturally athletic, and I think playing strong, female roles just kind of happened.

Adrianne Palicki

#15. What I want to do is play roles as a black man, instead of playing black man's roles. You know?

Jim Brown

#16. I never thought I would get married and have kids. I thought I was going to be a gypsy actor, traveling all over the world playing the great roles. I ended up having a kid very young, and it put things in perspective.

Bobby Cannavale

#17. I want to keep playing strong female roles. I don't mean superheroes, but women who are really alive.

Bel Powley

#18. I'm a big fan of character actors like Johnny Depp and Gary Oldman. My goal is to continue playing character roles in indie films and move into playing character leads.

Thomas Ian Nicholas

#19. I feel that a lot of roles in television can really typecast someone as one type of actor or playing one type of role, but I really don't think that my role in 'Weeds' did at all.

Alexander Gould

#20. The term, information at your fingertips, is to remind people what a broad role the personal computer will be playing. It's not a computation device, it's not a word processing or a spreadsheet device. It's a window onto the world of information.

Bill Gates

#21. I think as far as straight actors playing gay roles, "Brokeback Mountain" was a big breakthrough. I'm pretty sure when they were casting that movie that - I think the story is, like you know, 10 to 15 other actors turned it down.

James Franco

#22. Why were my visitors so secretive, hiding themselves behind my consciousness. I could only conclude that they were using me and did not want me to know why ... What if they were dangerous? Then I was terribly dangerous because I was playing a role in acclimatizing people to them.

Whitley Strieber

#23. I'm at the transition place myself, still playing high school girls but moving to a stage when I'm playing older roles and going to the places of stillness and wisdom and knowledge and weight. It's exciting and scary.

Tatiana Maslany

#24. Japanese gamers aren't really into action games right now. They're into role-playing or strategy games with a lot of stats, but action titles are still really popular across the US and Europe.

Hideo Kojima

#25. The 'Family Ties' role was the first of many gay roles that I've ended up playing. I remember that I made them laugh, and it made me feel good, 'cause it really cracked them up.

Hank Azaria

#26. All my life, I have taken inventory at intervals. For example, when I became a movie actor and suddenly I had to deal with fame, money and playing so many roles, I lost myself. I said, 'Who am I?' And I wrote my first book to deal with that, 'The Ragman's Son.'

Kirk Douglas

#27. I don't think that you necessarily need a certain type of background to take on roles. You see actors from very, very privileged backgrounds playing working class characters and vice-versa. I don't think your background limits you as to what you can do.

Daniel Radcliffe

#28. I love the action that I'm able to do. I grew up in Maine, outdoors and playing with the boys and shooting skeet. I have my girly side, too. But, I do like playing the strong female roles, especially now with something as simple as Twitter, where you've got young women following you.

Rachel Nichols

#29. There are a whole bunch of roles where people say, 'Oh, you're playing yourself.' I guess it's kind of a compliment. Or people say, 'Oh, man, you just roll out of bed and do that.' The work is to make it look effortless. That's the hard part.

Matthew McConaughey

#30. Acting is sort of an extension of childhood. You get to play all of these roles and have so much fun. Playing an athlete would be so cool. Or where you get to shoot guns, ride horses. I wouldn't turn down any of that.

Jon Hamm

#31. Gender roles suck, says Swift Fox.
Then you should stop playing them, thinks Toby.

Margaret Atwood

#32. For me, it doesn't matter whether it's a comedy, a Western or horror. As long as you've got a good story to tell, the genre almost doesn't matter. As an actor playing the role, it's all rooted in reality.

Patrick Wilson

#33. The contemporary memoir is playing an important role in at least just bringing certain relationships out into the open in American society, and also it's a place where the novel of development, the novel of consciousness, has gone.

Marco Roth

#34. The key to teamwork is to learn a role, accept a role, and strive to become excellent playing it.

Pat Riley

#35. With our Reserve and Guard units playing increasingly important roles in the war on terror and in Iraq, it is unacceptable to make them jump through any unnecessary hurdles.

Pat Roberts

#36. With theatre, we all agree to suspend our disbelief about so many things, but not about race. It's totally OK to have one actor playing five roles - people are willing to believe that. But they won't believe it if there's a black or an Asian kid who has white parents. What does that say about us?

David Henry Hwang

#37. Welcome to The Daily Show, I'm John Oliver. Jon Stewart is still not here. He is currently living out a live-action Lord of the Rings role-playing experience deep in the New Zealand wilderness.

John Oliver

#38. I've become really good at turning down the boring, pretty girl roles, the trophy wife, supermodel, beautiful girlfriend roles. I mean, playing somebody who's perfect holds no allure for me, whatsoever. It's just boring.

Rebecca Romijn

#39. It is not the role of government to use the taxation and welfare system as a tool to level the playing field.

Joe Hockey

#40. Playing our parts. Yes, we all have to do that and from childhood on, I have found that my own character has been much harder to play worthily and far harder at times to comprehend than any of the roles I have portrayed.

Bette Davis

#41. Stop wasting time in playing a role or a concept. Instead, learn to ACTUALIZE YOURSELF, your potential.

Bruce Lee

#42. Men are boys for such a long time and really don't start getting the great roles until they're in their mid-thirties. But then they've got a long time to do them, whereas for women, it's all about playing younger and younger and younger.

Cate Blanchett

#43. I believe when actors say they can go crazy playing the same role, over and over again.

Tyler Posey

#44. I think the best roles are in dark movies. It's roles that aren't you. It's fun playing someone that's not me. If I'm playing me all the time, then it's not acting. It's just being yourself.

Chloe Grace Moretz

#45. God is playing a role in all religions and that Christians are more united than they sometimes think.

George O. Wood

#46. For a long time I did not want to do television because I did not want to get stuck playing the same person. I wanted the ongoing challenge of a variety of roles.

Kathy Bates

#47. I have enough drama in my career, and then always playing dramatic roles and storylines ... I like to lead a very low profile.

Jessica Lowndes

#48. I think I was probably able to flip characters in my head as if I was playing different roles in order to write the different people because you kind of have to be one person, and inhabit him and write from his voice and be her and write her voice. So I think that helped.

Angelina Jolie

#49. When I read something, I want to be surprised. So I read something and go, "Wow, I never, ever would have thought of playing this kind of role. This is exciting me, let's go do this."

Guy Pearce

#50. I started here in Australia, playing a lot of roles but never the lead guy in shows here. I always tended to play the rougher guy, the criminal who gets caught or shot by the cops. Or the boyfriend from the wrong side of the tracks.

Sullivan Stapleton

#51. My main goal, when I started acting, was to show as much versatility as possible because I like playing diverse roles.

Daniela Ruah

#52. I've always been short and stocky. So when I got into repertory theatre after graduation, I found myself doing character roles: because of my deep voice, shape and height, I was playing 40-year-old, 50-year-old roles at the age of 23.

David Suchet

#53. I don't ever get the great looking lawyer roles because I've got a thick neck from playing football.

Channing Tatum

#54. Brad Dourif as Charles Lee Ray, it's impossible to imagine anyone else in that role. I mean, he's just so great. Over the course of the five movies, he always just takes it so seriously, doesn't condescend to the material, whatsoever and just treats it as if he was playing Hamlet.

David Kirschner

#55. If you don't feel comfortable playing a role, if you're in a scenario that's not conducive for that kind of environment, then that's when you don't do well.

Nina Dobrev

#56. Authority is granted to people who are perceived as authoring their own words, their own actions, their own lives, rather than playing a scripted role at great remove from their own hearts.

Parker J. Palmer

#57. I came to the United States to see what would happen in 2000 after working for 20 years in Australia and asked my agent to look out for the nasty roles because I'd become famous for playing the nicest man in Australia. So I wanted to play bad guys.

Alan Dale

#58. I like playing an array of different roles. From the fun, comedic roles to the serious roles. It's always fun to play the role that either closely represents your own personality or the role that is completely opposite of yourself.

Manika

#59. I don't play the role of a villain, really, but I like playing anti-hero kind of roles. I like characters where there's conflict, drama, and more personal investment than just being heroes.

Randeep Hooda

#60. Actors on stage, you can go from playing a myriad of roles, from Shakespeare to a Eugene O'Neil drama, and it's the norm. I came up in a world where you're supposed to be able to do three things very well. Act, sing, dance, paint, do something. The emphasis was on versatility.

Rocky Carroll

#61. From this perspective, we were all divine Shakespeares, creating and playing the roles of muscled heroes and conniving villains, pious saints and debauched sinners, corrupt CEOs and disinterested temp workers.

Jonathan Talat Phillips

#62. If you come from a normal family, you immediately start playing the role of a boy, a girl a man or a woman, but I'm sure you'll agree with me that those are only roles, limited roles, at that.

John Lone

#63. There is no need to change my image. I like my image, and the audience likes it, too. I am very comfortable with the kind of roles I do, and as I am not doing the same character or playing myself. I explore my characters; I don't brood over my broody image.

Randeep Hooda

#64. I always get cast as the girl who's dying or the girl who's killing or the girl who's suicidal - all these heavy roles. But I like playing them.

Lauren German

#65. The big-name stars ... are always going to be playing what they've played before if they want to remain so-called A-list stars. That's why someone like Johnny Depp is doing more interesting roles not caring about the size of the movie.

Ben Stiller

#66. It may seem that we have multiple realities - because we're capable of playing many different roles in our life.

Art Hochberg

#67. I think going into 'New Moon,' I knew the characters better. I knew the world better and I knew the actors who would be playing these roles. I had a sense of their rhythms and tones. 'Twilight' I was writing in a vacuum. We hadn't cast it yet.

Melissa Rosenberg

#68. I just love the whole art form of acting, of being in front of a camera and playing different things. Not that I would ever say I'm the greatest actor in the world, but I am capable of playing different kinds of roles that emotionally I could get into.

Andrew Dice Clay

#69. By playing these games about "arbitrary" gender roles, we have not succeeded in outlawing masculinity, but we have robbed it of much of its vocabulary. There are not very many acceptable ways to speak "masculine" anymore. We are all in denial, and the results are not pretty.

Douglas Wilson

#70. Playing Sgt, Trotter in 'The Mousetrap' is the same as playing Scripps in 'The History Boys,' in the sense that they're dream roles that I've always wanted to do. The fact they're letting me do this professionally and I'm getting paid for it, I find astonishing.

Thomas Howes

#71. Well oddly enough, I liken the years at MGM, and I was there for about eight years, to doing stock, what we used to call repertory or stock, playing a whole bunch of different roles.

Angela Lansbury

#72. It was a surprise to me and a happy accident that it was such a skill [natural falsetto] - a latent skill and that there was a way to exploit it. And it was a key to playing great role Frankie Valli in such a huge show.

John Lloyd Young

#73. We were using Brooke as an actress; she was playing different roles: a liberated woman, a teenager, a vamp.

Calvin Klein

#74. Because of fear, and the way my career went, I started playing a lot of villainous roles.

Dennis Christopher

#75. When you master role-playing [gaming], you become immersed in an activity that is peerless among leisure-time pursuits.

Gary Gygax

#76. I grew up without the rose-tinted look at the profession many of my friends had, but I've been very lucky playing major roles in 'An Ideal Husband', 'Arcadia' and 'The Memory of Water'.

Samantha Bond

#77. I am a woman pretending to be a man, pretending to be this ship's first officer, pretending to be a pirate, pretending to be innocent of murder ... I begin to lose track of all the roles I am playing.

Mercedes Lackey

#78. It's what I've always wanted to do and each part you play gets you closer and closer to the roles that you dreamed of playing.

Michael Eklund

#79. Actually the years when I was playing totally un - well, they were just roles that just went by the board, you wouldn't want to know. But anyway, I'm glad I had that chance to build my craft.

Angela Lansbury

#80. I was playing pretty boys and these angelic roles like Nicholas Nickleby and all that stuff. And I was like, 'What am I doing? This isn't who I am, as a man or an artist.' I had to overcome people's belief that I was too pretty to be a badass.

Charlie Hunnam

#81. Even for survivors, now, there is nothing but roles. Like a bizarre reversal of animals playing dead, we are expected to act alive when we are dead inside. There is nowhere for the truth of one's feelings.

Phyllis Edgerly Ring

#82. I am the least qualified person to comment on anyone playing the role of Batman since I so terribly destroyed the part,

George Clooney

#83. I stay away from the elf roles; I stay away from playing a leprechaun. All the roles I try to do are something that an average actor would do.

Verne Troyer

#84. Knowing that Gene and Morgan were playing those roles made it much easier to put the script together-we knew who we were writing it for. It took some mystery away.

Stephen Hopkins

#85. I loved playing a dramatic role. There's a side of me a lot of people don't know, and when I do dramatic roles, it just all comes out.

Bow Wow

#86. All I will say is that I'm playing a lot of different roles that, to be honest, are more interesting and demanding than any I've played before.

Sophie Marceau

#87. I've been playing these schoolgirl roles in all my movies. Every time I went to the set, it felt like I was going to school.

Chiaki Kuriyama

#88. I feel inauthentic at a party ... Going to a party is a 'low' activity - the authentic self is compromised, fragmented - one plays 'roles.' One isn't fully present, beyond role-playing. One doesn't (can't) tell the full truth, which means one is lying, even if one doesn't literally tell lies.

Susan Sontag

#89. When I have to play the same role every day, I have the flexibility to play the character in so many different ways. It's almost like playing five different roles.

Simon Baker

#90. I don't need the money after 11 years on 'Frasier,' and there aren't that many great roles onstage left for somebody my age. I'm more interested in playing those roles than I am in playing bit parts in movies.

John Mahoney

#91. There's been a lot of role reversal going on in the band. The roles people have been playing for a long time will always be there, but everybody's willing to try on different outfits.

Stone Gossard

#92. I loved working with Valerie. That was the most wonderful revelation to find that when we are on a set and we're playing our roles, we're like separated twins. We can almost finish each other's dialogue.

Mary Tyler Moore

#93. The heritage of a British actor revolves around the challenges of playing the classic roles to meet certain levels of success as an actor. In America, the heritage of an actor is based on cinema mainly.

Brian Cox

#94. I'm looking forward to playing the meatier roles you get in your 30s. The early 20s can be a hard time for an actress - it's always bombshell or romantic lead. The good stuff you can really sink your teeth into comes later.

Jessica Marais

#95. I love playing serious! That's a relief for me. It means something. It sounds dead corny and cheesy, but on a day-to-day basis, you can't just let loose and cry. So as an actress playing those gritty roles, I can play it quite decently.

Lauren Socha

#96. My first job when I got my equity card was acting in 14 plays back-to-back. Playing that many roles, you look for ways of differentiating the characters physically, which goes hand in hand with understanding them psychologically.

Andy Serkis

#97. I've been lucky to learn by playing all kinds of roles and watching all kinds of really good cinematographers, actors, and directors for many years before people were even aware of me in terms of audience.

Viggo Mortensen

#98. For nearly eight decades, I've had the great fortune of playing thousands of roles before millions of people.

Dick Van Patten

#99. The only people playing the roles of classic rock stars are hip-hop artists, now. Kanye's stage persona, and the way he approaches making albums, and the way he wants to be better than everyone else? That's reminiscent of Freddie Mercury. That's reminiscent of the Beatles.

Jack Antonoff

#100. It's fun playing two roles. The roles provide a wonderful range of emotions. Stuart is childlike and sensitive. Adam is ruthless, outrageous. He's flamboyant. He does the unexpected.

David Canary