Roles Quotes

Essentially, I'm a small-part actor who's been lucky enough to play leading roles for most of his life.

There are some older women out there who are just knockouts, real beauties, and they're not getting the roles they should.

I've become so earthy. And I never was earthy. I'm doing all kinds of different roles which are not at all like the intellectual and the legal mind of Ben Stone.

I think in the early part of my career, the roles were so disparate that it never gave anybody an opportunity to understand my essence and what I would be good at doing, as opposed to what I would not be good at doing, so these little moments of beautiful things that were happening to me were consistent, but very few and very far between.

I'm not in the business of becoming famous. And that's the advice I give to younger aspiring actors. Work onstage and do the little roles. In the end it's not important to be seen. It's important to do. There's a lot of disappointment in this business, but my family keeps me grounded.

Everyone knows in the industry that when these great roles come up, every two years, there's a huge number of people up for them. I'm not one of those top five females that can personally finance any film.

I'm not intimidated by lead roles. I'm better in them. I don't feel pressure. I feel released at times like that. That's what I'm born to do.

I have always chosen roles that I believed in - not ones that I thought might further my career.

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.

There are roles that are terrifying because they're large or you may feel that they're out of your line, but I'm never terrified once the actual work begins. Once you begin rehearsal, then it's small building blocks. It's solving little problems one at a time.

I am not an angel and do not pretend to be. That is not one of my roles. But I am not the devil either. I am a woman and a serious artist, and I would like so to be judged.

After 9/11 and the impending actors' strike of a few years ago, roles dried up for everyone.

Quiet people, people who aren't given to emotional outbursts, people who are economic with words - they're also fun to play, but you find yourself needing a laser precision in those roles. Otherwise you just sort of stand around, looking slightly brain-dead. You worry about being uninteresting.

Yes. Otherwise I could have done a lot of Hollywood movies. After Crouching Tiger I got a lot of offers, but I turned them down because they were all victim roles - poor girls sold to America to be a wife or whatever. I know I have the ability to go deeper, to take on more original roles than that.

Obviously the first roles that you're proud of are the ones that everybody else liked too.

I was never interested in 'Teen Beat' like roles. I just wanted to work.

Being an actor gives you a chance to play all kinds of roles, very moving and dramatic on one project, silly and girlish on another. That's the most interesting thing out this business, you get to keep reinventing yourself.

It took several years of hard work in small roles before I attained stardom.

I still have a reputation as an eccentric. But the fact is that audiences probably mix up my roles with me as a person.

It's good to be busy on a film set because there is a lot of sitting around, so if you've got two roles to play at one time, then that's great to do.

I think it is important for people who are given leadership roles to assume that role immediately.

You have actresses like Meryl Streep and Julia Roberts, who have roles specially written for them.

If you go in and audition for roles rather than just be offered them, then you kind of get a chance to kind of discover that you can do something that you didn't think you could do.

I figured as I got older, the good roles for women would be in the theatre. So 15 years ago I started building a Broadway career to try and develop the chops to be accepted as a great theatrical actress.

I don't think an actor ever wants to establish an image. That certainly hurt me, and yet that is also what made me successful and eventually able to do more challenging roles.

Well you know, I think a lot of us in marriage know that you play different roles at different times. And Mitt can get very intense, and I can have the ability to kind of talk him off the rails sometimes and say, 'Hey let's look at what is really important and let's do that now.'

I think real life reflects your movies. In your life, you pick stuff that influences what movie roles you wanna pick. I think if you've got an interesting life, you wanna do interesting movies about interesting things.

Well, I have a couple of projects in the pipeline, but I'm taking things slow for now and being choosy about the roles I take up. One thing I can assure you of is that you are going to see a lot of me!

One of the pleasures of being an actor is quite simply taking a walk in someone else's shoes. And when I look at the roles I've played, I'm kind of amazed at all the wonderful adventures I've had and the different things I've learned.

Lead roles are fun, but I'm especially happy other, more colorful supporting stuff has come along.