Ever since my mother sent me to Saturday morning grammar classes when I was 7, I wanted to become a famous actor. I loved the idea of captivating an audience and moving them truly through performance, but more importantly being recognized and heavily...
I also think if you're an actor and you can improvise, when you go on an audition and you can improvise you're just a genius. If you can, you know, take a Tide commercial and you can just say one funny line that's not in the commercial they think you...
In the film world, and I know this from just talking to other people, that I'm known as a kind of dramatic, serious, almost humorless actor, and the fact is I'm a funny guy, and I spend most of my life trying to find a lighter side of things and on s...
It's funny, my kids and I live together, and I have a lot of actor friends. So my kids think everyone is on television every now and again, since everyone they know pops up here, but there's a whole rap of things they won't watch until they're 16 or ...
You know what? I never really factor Hollywood into anything. I'm a black actor, so I can't really control what Hollywood thinks. I gotta go do my thing, and my jokes have got to be funny. Whatever I do has got to be great.
I definitely knew I wanted to be an actor in high school. I was doing plays and musicals, and I loved 'Saturday Night Live' and thought that was what I wanted to do - funny sketches and comedies. So I knew then, but I didn't know how to go about it, ...
Nine out of 10 times these guys will hit it-they'll be on something incredibly funny, but one out of 10, two out of 10, they'll fall flat on their faces. That's what makes them great actors: they take those chances, they don't play it safe.
As an actor you get categorized by other people, but it's not like I arrange myself into comedy mode or serious mode. If it's good writing you just have to play it true - if it's funny, it's funny. But obviously you don't want it to be amusing if you...
Sometimes you're watching a great film actor, and if you stand 10 feet away from them, you're like, 'God, they're terrible. They're not doing anything.' And then you see the close-up, and it's so nuanced, and so much expression is happening. They wer...
When I was 14, I almost had a big green leprechaun tattooed on my forearm. Thank God I didn't - it would have been a nightmare to cover up as an actor. I went with a group of mates and, being Irish, thought a leprechaun would be perfect.
I'm quite ignorant about fashion and I'm colourblind, so it's all a tad tricky. My only knowledge of that world comes through Christopher Bailey, whom I first met in 2008 when I did a campaign for Burberry that featured musicians, artists, actors and...
It's a wonderful profession, and it opens lots of doors, and I think it's quite right that people can accuse actors and actresses of being dilettante, but you learn on every job, whatever it is, the process moves you on in some way, and yeah, I want ...
You can go the route of not living your life at all - and a lot of actors do that, where they just won't even go out of the house at all - but it makes life so unenjoyable. You can't go out, you can't hold hands with your girlfriend, you can't do any...
I know certainly, when one job draws to a close, that I feel I'm simply never going to work again. No one will ever want me for anything ever again. I think that's a vulnerable moment in every actor's life, and it happens every time you finish a film...
I had grand visions of being in professional sports. But when reality set in, I went, 'Oh, OK. I'll just move to Hollywood and be an actor.' I didn't want to look back on my life and wonder, 'What if I had done this? Or I had done that?'
I started classes and it wasn't because I was like, 'I want to be an actor!' - I was really interested in the theory of what acting can be and what it's about. It's all about living in the moment and kind of being present, which is something that at ...
I went from an unemployed actor's life to doing stand-up comedy, and that was fortuitous. It's not the usual way the crow flies, going from being in a TV sketch show to playing one of Shakespeare's finest characters, but, hey, that's the way it has h...
I think it's important to keep your personal life to yourself as much as you can. It protects your sanity and you need to have boundaries. And it helps that enchantment of watching an actor. If you know someone's favourite colour or what they like to...
It's a miracle to be an actor and to know that you have a job to go to a year from now is a rare thing, so I think peace of mind and financial stability come with that. Hopefully I'm a little wiser and have a little more perspective in my life than I...
If I would characterize my life, I would say that I was a very lucky actor who came into very lucky times, and got to Hollywood, and was put under contract by Warners in the very last days of the studio contract era, and was privileged to go through ...
There are some tremendous actors in the U.K. who have been knighted, and I've spent much of my life admiring many of them, like Laurence Olivier. So it's very flattering to be in their company. But you also end up in the company of people you don't a...
