Thinking back on it, I've been in this business since I was 3, and I grew up in musical theater, so I was raised and surrounded by gay men and gay women. I was hardly around anyone straight.
A. J. McLean
The demand in India is to have a hit, which becomes a promotion for the movie and makes people come to the theater. You have five songs and different promotions based on those. But when I do Western films, the need for originality is greater. Then I become very conscious about the writing.
A. R. Rahman
I was very driven in high school. I worked a bunch of odd jobs. I never partied. I never drank. I was just a theater geek who was obsessed with movies.
Aaron Paul
I never consciously got into comedy. It was sort of one of those things where I was a theater student, I was acting, I was doing comedy, I was doing dramatic stuff, so it's been something that I've always done and enjoyed doing and had an instinct to be relatively good at.
Aasif Mandvi
You can work really hard on your physicality, on your craft, on the films you do. You can choose the best of directors, the best of productions, get the best technicians, you can put your entire body and soul into the making of a film, but at the end of the day, it all depends on the mood of that one audience member that goes into that theater.
Abhishek Bachchan
I think theater is very much my natural home. But the truth is that the older I've got, and the more I've written film and television, I find it incredibly hard to write theater.
Abi Morgan
The Smith Center is a theater where you want to keep the lights on. The acoustics are amazing, and this is a stage that was built for sound.
Ace Young
In the James Cameron blockbuster 'Avatar,' 3-D cinematography is the real star. The bugs and crawling creatures seem to slither into the theater seats. The floating mountains of the planet Pandora hover gloriously overhead. And the Na'Vi, Pandora's 10-foot-tall, blue-skinned natives, come convincingly to life.
Adam Cohen
Security theater is the idea of putting on a big show of security in order to make people feel safe. That's why the TSA screens everything and takes your stuff away.
Adam Conover
Through theater and acting school, I found a way to articulate myself.
Adam Driver
My only close-to-game-plan is to follow good writing. If the writing is in TV or if it's in theater or in film, that's it. It doesn't really matter what the medium is.
Juilliard definitely emphasizes the theater. They don't train - at all really - for film acting. It's mostly process-oriented, pretty much for the stage.
I actually run a non-profit where one of the main objectives is to branch out and get a new audience for the theater. Just because the writing is so good and nothing is more effective than seeing something live and happening right in front of your face, so I definitely want to continue to pursue that.
I'm conflicted with theater in the city because you want to reach a diverse audience, and that audience doesn't typically go to the theater.
With 'Girls'... I feel like there's an impulse to try to make it look better or neater or more perfect, and when I watch theater, television, movies, it's always the imperfection I'm always more attracted to.
I want to show that theater isn't just talking about feelings or people wearing tights.
The most you play a character in the theater is, like, a couple months, and then you put it away.
I would love to do a live show with dancers and fashion and scenic elements - definitely bring my love of the theater to a concert-style performance.
Adam Lambert
The hardest thing in the world to do is to have someone in a seat in a theater laughing so hard that they're making weird sounds.
Adam McKay
Any show that's bringing in a young audience is doing a good thing, because that's the only way that theater will continue to grow. All the other audience members are going to be dead soon!
Adam Pascal
When I work in the theater, you know you'll get this almost devotional, religious experience where you're breaking bread with everyone every day.
Some of the greatest works of theater, from Chekov's work to modern playwrights', consist of just a few people in a room with no one leaving.
The biggest audience for Off Broadway is mostly coming in on a train - either Upper East Siders or Metro-North. I go to the theater, and everyone around me is over 50. How interested will they be in my kind of work?
Film directing has perfected my theater directing. I think when I first started directing, a lot of my stuff was very lateral; I was afraid to have the actors' backs turned away, afraid to put them too far upstage, and I think once I did more things with film, I got more interested in composition.
The original release of 'Star Wars' was literally the first movie I remember seeing in a theater. Four years old was probably too young - I recall believing, for some time, that Darth Vader was a robot.
When I put something into motion, the creativity starts to make other people want to jump in, and then a lot of people get employed. I'm just like a shark, in that way. If I stop swimming, I'll die. But, it really is about that shared experience with people. I'm from theater, and that's really what theater feels like.
It's a wonderful thing to be able to make fun of yourself and to do it in a way that sort of preserves your dignity but, at the same time, lets you play the theater of the absurd.
Crummy pictures, live appearances, circuses, avant garde theater, dinner theater. I've done it all. I've been shot out of cannons. I know what the people want. I'm out there with the people.
Look at 'Batman' - that was theater of the absurd, as is 'Family Guy.'
I've played dinner theaters. I'm a working stiff.
In theater, you go in-depth with your character, so coming to the States, it was inevitable to dig into the pilots I liked. I knew what characters I was going to be reading for, so I would dissect them and really get involved with them.
I don't really discriminate with my art. To me, it's my art, and it's to be expressed through whichever medium is there, whether it's treading the boards in the theater, on the small-screen TV, or on the large screen. I love theater, and it's definitely something I would love to do.
I had met a young lady who wanted to be in the theater. It was Judy Holliday. She had somehow fallen down the steps of the Village Vanguard, which still exists today.
You have to transmit to them what it's like being in the theater. And it has to come from somewhere inside you and not by being like what somebody did last year.
With 'True Detective,' you have a lot of time. How I like to describe it... it's like you're filming a theater piece.
The energy of live theater is indescribable. You are just in the moment for an hour and a half.
Obviously I love working in film and television, but I started in theater and I'd love to be on Broadway.
You go to a theater, you're in a darkened room, and you watch someone that you don't really know how many children they have or what their father's nickname might be; you don't have references and databases and rumors and half-truths - you're just transported by their storytelling.
When you do television, you're filming out of sequence sometimes. You have to ground yourself very quickly in the character and in the work and in the words. I think theater allowed me that sort of sharp, quick focus to do that.
The cultural center of Asia Minor, Pergamon boasted a vast library of 200,000 scrolls, a spectacular 10,000-seat theater, and a monumental Great Altar decorated with sculptures of the Olympian gods defeating the Giants. People came from all around the Mediterranean seeking cures at the famous Temple of Asclepius, god of medicine.
Theater represents to me this phenomenon in juxtaposition to real life, where there are all these imposed guidelines.
When Tupac turned thirteen, we were homeless on that day. His theater club gave him a party. Sometimes I do wonder that if I hadn't gone on with fool-heartedness, my son would have had an easier transition into this life. But at least I was able to keep art there. Otherwise he would've had no way to get his feelings out.
Theater people are always pining and agonizing because they're afraid that they'll be forgotten. And in America they're quite right. They will be.
My first wife was a theater person.
I went to a college in New York called New Paltz. I studied theater there for four years. I also studied privately in NYC with a teacher named Robert X. Modica.
I left the Gaiety School of Acting in Dublin in 2004, and I did five years of theater after that.
I did theater summer camps when I was a kid, and I enjoyed them, but they never felt quite right. But then there would always be a tiny improv workshop towards the end of camp, and I would always feel like I liked it so much better.
It took me years to actually get comfortable on the stage. I prefer the intimacy of screen; it comes easier to me. In theater, you have to be louder and bigger - that was harder for many years in my teens. But now I've conquered that. I eat up the stage. I love it.
I attended theater camps and classes growing up, but there was never any talk of me making a life out of acting. My parents were much too practical and grounded for that.
I majored in theater, so I'd love to get back on a stage.
