We had an ancient Russian acting coach at my drama school who said the worst offense you could commit was to let your subtext show. That is the point of acting, is to be saying one thing and not be allowed by society or your predicament to show what you're really feeling. In a way, I think that's why the therapy generation has killed script writing, because all you ever get is people going, "Hi, I'm feeling really angry right now."
The excruciating moments of drama are when people are allowed to show or say what they feel.
Joss Whedon writes beautiful drama. His sensitivity and his sense of drama and scenes are pretty exceptional. There's no one else writing like him, really, in sci-fi and TV. That's not to say there are no astonishing writers on TV. I was nervous about coming to America and playing an English person who speaks very English when all the writers are American, because it's a very particular thing to imitate, and if it's badly imitated, it sounds painfully contorted and silly. And he writes very well for English people. It was Joss Whedon who persuaded me.
When I was starting out, I always wanted to be able to do everything - comedy and drama and action, and everything in between. Film is so diverse, and it's fun to be able to take advantage of all of it.
I always assumed I would leave drama school and do 'Lady Macbeth' and all sorts of serious things. It just didn't happen.
Photojournalism is photography with more story telling. A single image can be amazing and dramatic. I started out shooting individual images, but I found I wanted to have more of a voice: to actually say something. I wanted to do something more personal over a long period of time, with more authorship.
I haven't ever seen a period drama that has a fantasy element to it, that's set in London, that's as lavish as it is, and that's made for American TV.
So might we ourselves look down into some rock-pool where lowly creatures repeat with naive zest dramas learned by their ancestors æons ago.
A dramatic writer should never tell anything he can show.
I do seem to favor a deathbed confession as the occasion for my dramatic monologues.
I do believe we are actors in our own dramas, which, moment by moment, we ourselves write; that we are characters in our own fictions or those devised for us by someone or something else.
My fondness for extended monologue might have been encouraged by two decades of writing stage and radio dramas.
I have always been very fond of them (drama critics) . . . I think it is so frightfully clever of them to go night after night to the theatre and know so little about it.
Some of the things I've been in are comedic, but I don't get considered for true comedies because I'm a 'dramatic' actor.
I'd like to try different genres: comedy, period drama, rom-com, action.
Drama sells more than the truth.
Where we're telling the story of the history of the ensemblist [in the "Ensemblist Essentials"], using the nine musicals that have won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama as fixed points in time We're going from 1931 to 2016 and using these shows to talk about what the typical show was like for an ensemblist at the time; did this show change anything about that job, while it was changing everything about the way theatre was written and produced and made?
I don't think rap really fits in to 'American Idol' in the sense that I believe rap is an art form in itself more akin to poetry, more akin to drama, if you will.
Packed with fascinating personal perspective and testimony, Michael Takiffs A Complicated Man wholly justifies its title. The book is far more than a kaleidoscopic oral biography of President Bill Clinton. Aspect by aspect, it guides us through the struggles of postmodern America, as the most ambitious baby boomer of his generation seeks to modernize the Democratic Party-and, as in a Greek drama, is fated to be destroyed. Veritably, an all-American saga, with a cast of thousands-favorable and unfavorable.
I can only do it if there's humour, wit, comedy and drama. If you can get audiences laughing and then suddenly turn them to tears... it's a weird way of making a living making people cry, but I think it's very exciting to be able to send audiences on a rollercoaster ride.
I've always loved the drama and the creating of a role and performance and all that comes with that, but I then also kind of like to have just the white picket fence life if that makes sense.
I just don't think that being unable to forgive someone is the most healing move. It can be, and I've had times in my life when I thought I would be better off without the drama that another person was bringing to me, but cutting someone out isn't always the answer. I know someone who cut her mother out and it didn't magically heal her. She's still haunted. It's not as if you can wipe clean all of your memories of having a mother, or wanting or needing one.
I just try to keep it fresh. I try to keep it interesting. The truth is my roots are independently spirited dramas that are small, and I will always go back to that well, because that's where I broke out of. But I'm going to keep doing as many different movies as I possibly can.
I happen to still like really dark, dramatic, fractured characters. They're the reason I got into movies.
I love it all. I don't want to go through my career with one hand tied behind my back. I love making kids happy. I love the midnight audience. I like intense dramas. And I like high-adrenaline action films.
