Two young actresses I admire are Emma Stone and Emma Watson, because they are intelligent, talented actresses and have a great sense of humor. They have learned to balance what they love in life - acting, school and everything else.
I left school and couldn't find acting work, so I started going to clubs where you could do stand-up. I've always improvised, and stand-up was this great release. All of a sudden, it was just me and the audience.
I love filmmaking, but I decided to go to drama school because I thought that when I'm 60 and looking back on my life, if acting hadn't been a part of it, I would hate myself.
As a senior in high school, you figure out what you want to do with your life. I asked myself if I wanted to get back into acting and thought: 'Yes, but under my own terms and nothing like it was before.'
I went to a very academic school that actually - when I got to the point of wanting to pursue acting, they just had no idea how to do that, because all of their contacts were very academic.
When I was a senior, I got accepted into the Julliard School for Dance, but ultimately decided to move to L.A. to act, so that was a fun conversation with the parents. I truly have some of the greatest parents ever.
I went to a lot of theatre schools, got a lot of training, did a lot of repertory where you do a different play every night. I took a lot of voice, movement, and acting classes.
Acting is always going to be number one, but what I learned in film school, I want to make that happen too, so I'm going to actually start working on my own.
Everything I've ever learned about acting - and I went to theater school - was about playing what the character wants and throwing yourself fully into going after what the character wants.
In Michigan, if you want to act, it's local theater, it's high school theater and it's going to camp and putting on plays in the summer, and I always loved doing that. There was something that just drew me to it.
I was bullied from grade one to six. Even middle school was tough for me. Everyone had these pre-existing friendships, and I was the new kid, who was acting, so that didn't help much either. It was really tough.
So I was determined to use my last two years in college doing something I thought I would enjoy, which was acting. And it was probably because there was girls over in the drama school too, you know?
I did theatre a lot when I was a kid. Then I went to acting school in New York. I did a lot of behind the scenes in college. I wanted to learn while I had the time. I studied theatre and film in different capacities.
I started acting when I was seven. And I went to a local drama school which is very well-known in London. Because of that, I started getting jobs, and I worked all the time as a child, pretty much non-stop.
I worked for a charity for a while, but... well, I started acting while I was in high school. I kind of just got lucky enough to live at my parents' house until I was actually making enough money to be somebody's roommate.
Because I came from a small town outside Glasgow, nobody from my school had ever gone into the acting profession. It was just something you didn't do. You joined the bank or became a teacher or whatever you did.
A historian tries to understand what happened, why it happened, what was the context, who did what, and what assumptions led them to act as they did. A historian customarily displays a certain diffidence about trying to influence events, knowing that...
At school, up to the age of sixteen, I found history boring, for we were studying the Industrial Revolution, which was all about Acts, Trade Unions and the factory system, and I wanted to know about people, because it is people who make history.
I was always interested in the arts as a child - drawing, painting, and piano - but acting became a favourite. I was a major theatre geek in high school - if I wasn't in the drama room at lunch rehearsing, I'd be in the art room finishing up some typ...
In 1996, Shakespeare's 'Twelfth Night' was removed from classrooms after a school board passed a 'prohibition of alternative lifestyle instruction' act. Apparently, a young female character disguised as a boy was a danger to the youth of Merrimack, N...
With big, emotional roles it's very easy, especially if you've grown up in the American school of acting, to exploit your own pain. You have to be careful about that, because 9 times out of 10, your pain is not appropriate to the character.
