Hollywood Struggles Quotes

I never had a great role in a great film.

There've been moments where I just was tired of being in L.A. It was very difficult. I mean, you're constantly rejected. And that's OK, it's just really frustrating for me, because I try to read scripts and projects that have really great, deeper, meaningful qualities to them.

When I first came to Hollywood, I could not break into movies.

In L.A., you constantly go on auditions, and you're usually not what they're looking for - you get used to going back and back to the same show, and nothing happens.

I'm trying to fight typecasting as hard as I can, while I have time.

Hollywood has turned into an emotional Detroit.

Unfortunately, I was branded as a glamour actress and was forced to do only glamour roles.

The truth is I made a few good movies in the '50s, then went into freefall.

I guess Johnny Depp has a pretty good career. I love a lot of parts that actors have played, so I love pieces of their career, but it's pretty hard to look at an actor's whole career and go, 'That was awesome!' Usually it either ends on a crappy show or with no work at all.

When I first came to L.A., I was plotting out my career choices as if I actually had a choice. Unless you're Brad Pitt, Johnny Depp, impossibly good-looking, or look like a freak, you have to be malleable and open to everything that comes your way because that's what makes it possible to pay your mortgage and eat.

I was on 'Gilmore Girls' for seven years and had a couple decent years after that. Then, two years of almost nothing. I had jobs here and there, but I got very, very scared.

Cool people still have a hard time showing what they got in Hollywood.

I know many big stars who asked for work when they were out of it.

When I was little, my father was one of the biggest names in Hollywood. Suddenly - and how it happened to him was always a great mystery to me - he wasn't a star anymore; he was on the fringe. From the time I was 14, I was always conscious of a sense of worry, of terrific insecurity - agents, phony talk, the waits for the phone to ring.

I didn't work for a year and a half after 'Melvin and Howard' because all I was being offered was silly parts.

If you take the '70s with Blaxploitation pictures, there was a proliferation of black-content films and motion pictures, television, stage plays and so forth at a time when Hollywood was in trouble financially, and it was cheaper to do black films to keep the lights on until they could reestablish themselves.

Hedda Hopper was a better direct opponent to [Dalton] Trumbo. We wanted to use Trumbo's battles to represent the larger battles, so the audience could understand the personal sacrifice he went through and the personal damage to his family. The choices were about who were the best representations of his antagonists, which is why we chose as we did.

A lot of actors in my age bracket look at being still standing as pretty good.

I wrote a pilot for myself. It's about a Latina actress trying to make it in Hollywood. It's pretty funny.

In the years since I worked with John Hughes, there were many years where I literally had hundred of doors slammed in my face because I wasn't that kid anymore, and I wasn't a character actor, and I wasn't a leading man, and I wasn't whatever Hollywood was looking for.

It is so hard to get movies made in Hollywood that you got to have six going at once, and you know, probably none of those get made.

Some mornings you wake up and think, gee I look handsome today. Other days I think, what am I doing in the movies? I wanna go back to Ireland and drive a forklift.

I have the strangest time to get cast in anything. 'Ghost' was the same thing. Six months I had to wait for them to decide they had seen everybody possible. Why not? What limits me? I'm black? Oh, am I black?

A lot of the auditions in L.A. do feel like cattle calls, with hundreds of people. I started to lose sight of what I wanted, because you get so desperate for a job that you stop caring whether it's a good script. You're just pleased to be testing for something - but then if you get it, you're doing it for potentially six years, so it's a lottery.

I had a really tough time for a few years. My show was gone. My phone wasn't ringing. There wasn't one job offer. And at that point, I thought I knew for sure that I wouldn't work in Hollywood again.