Alfred Molina Quotes
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Music is an essential part of my life and I'm completely lost without a good album to listen to or my iPod in my pocket!
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I enjoy playing villains - I'm very proud that I belong to a very honorable tradition of British actors who come to Hollywood to play the bad guys. At some point in American film, I think there was the idea that the British accent had a tone to it that's a little bit naughty.
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The big stars I felt a kinship with were never the romantic leads. It wasn't Steve McQueen or Robert Redford - it was people like Walter Matthau and Anthony Quinn. My big hero was Tommy Cooper.
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Character actors aren't a brand in the same way that high-profile leading men are.
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When I was younger I was always big; I was a fat boy at school. I had an early growth spurt, and when I went to secondary school I was tall enough to be a policeman.
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Playing villains is very liberating because unlike the leading man, nothing is expected of you. Leading men have to look good, they have to behave in a certain way, they have to fulfill an audience's expectations. But as a bad guy, you have free license to take the audience by surprise. And that's what audiences want - they want unpredictability from their villains. The villain's job is to subvert it.
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My father was a waiter basically, and when I got my first professional job as an actor, I left a job that he found me for half the amount of money. So anyone would think that they're stupid, that that would be a stupid move.
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I think enjoying each other in a creative way is usually a result of when you're doing something that might be problematic - might be a little difficult to uncover. I've done it once in a stage production; we came in for two days and, just as an experiment, the director had us reading each other's roles. You hear another voice interpreting a line that maybe you were having trouble with. It can be very helpful. But we weren't really in the kind of situation where that was necessary.
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Even at drama school if there was a part of some eastern European thug it would be me.
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Every job is different. I don't think that I've ever had that wonderful feeling when you've finished a job or where you feel like you've mastered it or sort of nailed it... You can never be satisfied. If you're satisfied, it's time to retire.
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I love theater work because of the immediate effect your performance has on the audience. And I love the repetition; I love getting on the same stage for more than a month and reciting the same lines, trying to make a small or large step towards an improvement in my acting.
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The worst thing that an actor can do is go into any project with a lack of respect for the material. You can have an opinion about it, but you have to respect yourself in doing it.
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I think I went through early years of my career sort of thinking, "Well, maybe I'm just not British enough." And I always remember my father saying to me, "Don't think you're English, because however English you feel, some Englishman is going to remind you that you're not." Now, for him it must have been a much more acute experience, because he immigrated to England. I was born there, so I kind of felt I had the right to assume that I was British, but it's true. The English are a very warm and welcoming people, but there's a streak in there that reminds you, occasionally.
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I like doing everything - theater and film, radio and TV, comedy and tragedy. I love it all. And I've never really planned anything - I've always looked at my job in a rather simplistic way. It's like being a plumber. One day you might be fixing an early 20th century showerhead that requires real detailed work. The other day you might just be clearing a sewer. Both jobs are very different, but all the tools come out of the same box. That's the way I look at acting.
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I think, because of my background, which is slightly more exotic than the average British actor, I think, I sort of occupied this little niche quite early on of playing the foreign guy. It started way back at drama school, I played an Eastern European heavy, I played the Russian mobster. And I have done all those different ethnic roles, and I think it's partly because of my look, I think I've got an adaptable sort of nondescript ethnicity, which you can't quite pin down, but it's enough to kind of get a flavor of something.
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Screen work always boils down to that moment between the camera and the actor or the actors. It always boils down to that, ultimately. You serve the camera.
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When I get home after being away for work, my wife always stuffs the fridge with loads of what she calls 'nibbles' - all the great things you can eat straight from the fridge, like chunks of cheese, slices of ham, bowls of hummus.
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I've always loved teaching acting. I think it helps me to kind of get back to basics. It's like a refresher course for me as well, so in a sense, I'm hopefully learning as much as my students are - or at least discovering or re-discovering as much as they are. I find that when I teach, I'm reminded of my own sort of failings. I'm reminded of where I sometimes keep going wrong.
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To be challenged means to strive. I'm almost certain that's true.
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I love the theatre. It's a perfect life for an actor: you can do a couple of movies and then go and do a play, and then go back and do another movie. It's a nice way to live your life.
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You're suspended sixty feet up in the air, you've been up there for three hours, and all the shot requires is that you have to sort of react to getting punched in the head.
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I never made conscious choices. There were times in my life that I chose the first job that came along because I was broke. I think that there were maybe a handful of times that I had a choice. In recent years, Ive had more of a choice, and its been very nice to have that choice, but most of the time, you just hope that theres another job after this one.
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When I look back on my career - if that's what it is - it looks a bit like a crazy quilt, and I think it's just really because, when one job has finished, I've never really been in a position where I had three or four options.
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And I think it's because good cons are all based on the victim's need, and the successful con artist is the one, I guess, who can exploit that. I remember reading something about this, that one of the great traits of confidence tricksters is the level that they flatter their victim.