Casting Limitations Quotes

Helen Mirren and Meryl Streep can play with the boys but there just aren't that many tour-de-force roles out there for women.

Films with predominantly white casts can come in any form, tell any story, big or small. For black films, you have the light, fluffy rom-coms or 'Madea' movies, and then you have the black-torture awards movie.

Actors are limited by their appearance and while it has cost me some roles, it has got me some very important roles too.

Of course, I would like to play the guy next door, but nobody's going to hire me for that kind of role.

I've been a soldier, I've been a bunch of little girls, all sorts of roles that I would not have been able to be with on camera context because I just don't look the part.

You can't take on the qualities of a character that you'd never be cast in - and no one would ever cast you in.

That's a frustration sometimes, that certain directors that I'd like to work with, they just aren't doing stories that I'm sort of castable in. Not always, but sometimes I have that frustration.

If I can iron out my accent, it opens up another world of possible jobs. Whereas if you have that very strong European accent, it leaves you always being cast as the Hungarian maid or the stripper or whatever. I have voice lessons, and my coach has given me different tongue-twisters to rehearse at home.

A lot of times black actors get stuck in a box. They're up against a lot of limitations for the kind of films that they get approached about. It's easy to get stuck in a box and just be approached about nothing but urban films.

I'd go for roles that would say 'for all ethnicities,' but what they're pretty much saying is, 'We want a Caucasian guy or a black guy.' One or the other.

If you do something and it proves to be a success, then people go 'get him to do that type of thing again, but only slightly different'. Either you do that or you go 'No! I want to play a leprous, lesbian dwarf from Guatemala!' But those parts just aren't coming to me.

Left to myself, I would only play an Indian. But the reality was that there were hardly any Indian characters I could play in the films made in England and Hollywood. So I had to learn how to disappear into a variety of characters.

I think the scariest thing to me is to think that somebody would only associate me with one character and that that's all that I would get to play.

I've gotten involved in producing now, so the kinds of things that are more my own choice are more possible in that field because I don't have to be castable. I can actually get involved in getting stories off the ground that no one would ask me to be in because I'm the wrong age, the wrong sex, the wrong nationality, or whatever.

I think that the wonderful advantage we have in the film of being able to cast a girl as young as Emmy and which we couldn't do in the theatre of course because no girl of 16 or 17 could sing 8 shows a week, couldn't sing two.

You get pigeonholed by what you sort of look like. And I don't mean this in a self-deprecating way. I'm grateful for any opportunity to act. But I think that if you're not classically attractive or mainstream attractive, especially as you get older, there's only like three jobs that people think you do. Like, "police officer who may be gay." District attorney is a big one. Lawyer. Doctor.

When I tried to play characters that strayed from who I am it ended in disaster. People didn't expect me in comedies or musicals.

I'd like to talk in my own accent, but then there's that thing about getting typecast as, 'The British guy.' The role that makes you, that's normally what you're cast as forever more. Like, if I did a huge film with my British accent, that would be that.

When a show becomes successful, people want to hire the people on the show for other things, and we would all try to do other things, but we could never end up doing them, so casting directors were just like, 'Enough of them! Don't touch the 'Glee' kids, because you can't use them!'

Like every actor, you get notorious for maybe one role and then get offered a lot of similar roles.

I get told I'm too good-looking for a lot of roles. They don't write roles people would think I'm supposed to play as often as they used to - the rom-com pretty-boy storylines.