Black Actor Quotes & Sayings

It's great to be black in Hollywood. When a black actor does something, it seems new and different just by virtue of the fact that he's black. — Will Smith

If I had the gift of Jerry Seinfeld, of Bill Cosby, of Lewis Black, these instinctively brilliant comic minds, then you go that route! But you gotta know your limitations. I'm more of an actor, more of a process guy. I did Tom Snyder, just as Danny Aykroyd did on 'SNL.' I did it in the club. — Joe Piscopo

As an actor, you can show up on a set and be on a TV show for three or four years, or whatever it is and, by the end of it, you just want to do something else. — Michael Ian Black

People told me, when I was coming through the ranks, that a mark of a great actor is one who deals with the period of unemployment as well as they deal with the period of employment. — Claudia Black

The only other thing I can really remember wanting to do besides acting was a gas station attendant. At the time, that seemed like a great job - wash the windows, pump the gas - it looks so cool coming home with black hands. There's a natural transition, from wanting to be a gas station attendant to being an actor, right? — Daniel Stern

We salute her for a life of remarkable achievements as an actor, as a diplomat, and most importantly as our beloved mother, grandmother, great-grandmother and adored wife for fifty-five years of the late and much missed Charles Alden Black. — Shirley Temple

With theatre, we all agree to suspend our disbelief about so many things, but not about race. It's totally OK to have one actor playing five roles - people are willing to believe that. But they won't believe it if there's a black or an Asian kid who has white parents. What does that say about us? — David Henry Hwang

Black or white good parts are hard to come by. A good actor with a good opportunity has a shot; without the opportunity it doesn't matter how good you are. — Denzel Washington

I love playing all kinds of roles. I hope it doesn't sound too pretentious, but I always feel human nature is like a piano, and there are 88 keys, and there are some white keys and some black keys, and each character is a different chord on the piano. Basically, I hope that in the course of my life, I will have played all 88 keys. So, I'll have played heroes and villains and princes and kings and warriors and beggars and thieves and lovers and fathers and wizards and all of those things. That is why I'm an actor ... I love studying people. — Tom Hiddleston

We [black actors] are more respected in Europe, because in Europe, I'm not a black actor - I'm an action star. In America, I'm a black actor. — Fred Williamson

I've really dreamed of doing television. All of us do television, coming up. But when I was coming up, television was a black hole for actors. Now, television has a certain cache. Now everybody wants to be on TV because they're doing adult dramas. If you're an actor, it's like, "Well, get me on television," because it's the only place you can do it and also make a living at it. If my kids need shoes, I better do a TV show because I damn sure don't make any money with independent films. — Billy Bob Thornton

I'll never admit that I'm an actor, because the next horrible follow-up question is always, "Oh, what have I seen you in?" — Michael Ian Black

When you look at me you don't immediately imagine a very very glamorous icon, so it's only in the theater that I get to do these experiments. I've been an actor about 51 years now. I've played everything from an 8-year-old black boy to a 72-year-old French matriarch, and they hardly hire you to do that on TV. — Tyne Daly

One of the things I have an allergic reaction to playing, especially as a black actor, is the mandatory kind of best friend/cop/detective type. You will never see me in that movie. — David Oyelowo

I read the script, and I knew it was a good part. It was written for a white actor. That's what I'm up against - I have to try to make roles happen for me that aren't written black. — Gregory Hines

It is best to think of culture as a repertoire, like that of an actor,a musician, or a dancer. This image suggests that culture cultivates skills and habits in its users, so that one can be more or less good at the culture repertoire one performs,and that such cultured capacities may exist both as discrete skills,habits and orientations, and in larger assemblages, like the pieces a musician has mastered or the plays a actor has performed. It is in this sense that people have an array of cultural resources upon which they can draw. We can ask not only what pieces are in the repertoire but why some are performed at one time, some at another. — Karyn Lacy

Being an actor myself I realize that all actors believe they are qualified to play any role. If you showed me a script with a black woman character I would tell you that I could do it. That is what we do. We act as if we are someone else. — Richard Masur

The world we live in is made up of polar opposites, black/white, male/female, night/day, and a human being who possesses both masculine and feminine - vulnerability and strength - is intriguing to us, whether they be a singer or actor or dancer, intrigues us, because THAT Is who we really are. — RuPaul

The crew are the faces you see every morning and last at night before you go home. I spend more time with those people than I do with my friends and family, so they're forever a part of you and who you become as an actor so I hope I see them again. — Claudia Black

I decided to become an actor at five. I saw the most gorgeous woman that I had ever seen in my five years of living on television. She had on a long, red dress and her eyelashes looked like butterflies and I said, "Grandmamma, who is that?" She said, "Baby, that's Lola Falana." I said, "That's it right there. I want to be black, fabulous, and on TV." — Niecy Nash

As a black actor, you always have the feeling that there's not as much work out there as for a white counterpart, but is America after all; you have to play ball if you're going to play ball. — Dorian Missick

Me and Biggie share a storytelling ability
he was an actor on wax, too. His stories were so vivid and torrid, he made you feel them. And we both have the hardness. When I come out on the mic, you know it's me. — Black Rob

The camera implies meaning where no meaning exists. I had not celebrated that brother and sister. I had mocked them. I had exploited their sorrow. I had tried to make them part of a hopeful message on the state of the Union. To be black is to be the actor. To be white is to be the critic. — Don DeLillo

The more film I watch, the more John Ford looks like a giant. His politics aren't so good, and you have to learn to accept John Wayne as an actor, but he's a poet in black and white. — Jonathan Lethem

A Murphy [Eddie Murphy] movie is like a Sidney Poitier comedy - he's that intensely good ... He revolutionized acting. He's literally black Brando. Before Eddie Murphy, there were two schools of acting for a black actor: Either you played it LIKE THIS or youplayeditlahkdis. He was the first black guy in a movie to talk like I am talking right now. That did not exist for black actors before him. — Scott Raab

Paul Robeson was an athlete, Rutgers valedictorian, lawyer, writer, actor in movies and plays, great voice - a black male doing it all, back when some people thought he shouldn't. One reason I do all the things I do is to break stereotypes that people can only do certain things. — Dhani Jones

You don't recognize the actor, because he's not from Hollywood's generic teen male pool; the director hat to go off-Broadway, off-off-Broadway, to the little back stages to find this guy, olive-dusted skin, straight black hair, face that looks like he's never cracked a smile on his life. — Shukyou

I don't see myself as a 'black actor,' I'm just Shemar Moore the actor. I'm very proud to be black, but I'm just as much black as I am white. — Shemar Moore

I barely read. I'm not a good reader at all. Rather than reading, I used to sit in front of the TV and watch black-and-white cowboy movies. I'm a painfully slow reader. It's really bad as an actor, because you have to read a lot of scripts. It takes me like an average of three hours to read a script, which is pretty poor. — Will Poulter

I knew even before I had desire that it would be gnarled and knotted, black and hard, a tree that would never bear fruit, a fish that would never jump, a cat that would never meow. All my life, bitterness and regret, bitterness, and regret. "And yet," he said, briefly closing his eyes, "I was able to imagine the softness and sweetness of love, for a time." He rested his head upon his right hand, in a gesture worthy of a classical actor, and everyone in the Teatro Barbarossa heard his breathing. — Mark Helprin

I managed to get a short film with Channel 4 Films. I cast a young actor who'd done a bit of television before, a young actor called Ewan McGregor. That was very first thing. This writer had won this competition, and I made this little short, black and white movie. I think for both Ewan and I it was the start of our careers. — Justin Chadwick

You know what? I never really factor Hollywood into anything. I'm a black actor, so I can't really control what Hollywood thinks. I gotta go do my thing, and my jokes have got to be funny. Whatever I do has got to be great. — Jamie Foxx

Two minutes and fourteen seconds later, he'd somehow gotten trapped in a black hole on a site called Tumblr that led to porn of a most enthusiastic variety, if the faces of the six people on the screen had any measure. Gus may have shrieked slightly when one of the pornographic actors, a large Caucasian male with exuberant-looking nipples, glared at one of the females, gave a cocky smirk, and said, "I'm gonna get yo mouth pregnant." Gus slammed the computer shut just as the large pornographic actor began to do just that. For the next four minutes and seventeen seconds, he stood in his kitchen, rocking back and forth, moaning, "But you can't get her mouth pregnant, you just can't. — T.J. Klune

The story ends with a crack the actor Hans Conreid made on seeing my two hundred black and white pots. Said Hans, "You're one actor no one will ever be able to say he hasn't got a pot to ... " End quote. — Vincent Price

If you say "I'm going to be an actor, but I'll get a teaching degree just in case," when things get hard, you'll just be a teacher and that's how you get stuck. — Michael Ian Black

I hadn't intended to end up there. I meant to be a serious actor with a beard who wore a lot of black and wanted to share his misery with you. — Stephen Colbert

Handsome guy, Victor, in a brutal, black-Irish way. Like most New York bartenders, he was really an actor, or was it the reverse? ("Novelty") — John Crowley

I loved IRON MAN: Robert Downey Jr. has been and probably will be my favourite actor for a long time ... but IRON MAN, THE INCREDIBLE HULK, SUPERMAN RETURNS and all the others feel a little like Saturday morning cartoons next to the carbon black glory that is 'The Dark Knight.'
Trust me, *this* is the future of this sort of thing. — Grant Morrison

Who is he anyhow, an actor?"
"No."
"A dentist?"
" ... No, he's a gambler." Gatsby hesitated, then added cooly: "He's the man who fixed the World Series back in 1919."
"Fixed the World Series?" I repeated.
The idea staggered me. I remembered, of course, that the World Series had been fixed in 1919, but if I had thought of it at all I would have thought of it as something that merely happened, the end of an inevitable chain. It never occurred to me that one man could start to play with the faith of fifty million people
with the singlemindedness of a burglar blowing a safe.
"How did he happen to do that?" I asked after a minute.
"He just saw the opportunity."
"Why isn't he in jail?"
"They can't get him, old sport. He's a smart man. — F Scott Fitzgerald

What we really have to do is stop the adjective before the job title - whether it's 'black actor,' a 'gay actor' or 'anything actor,' Everybody thinks that equality comes from identifying people, and that's not where equality comes from. Equality comes from treating everybody the same regardless of who they are. I hope the media and the press catches on to that because it's time to move out of 1992. — Matthew Bomer

I wanted to become an actor. I went to Guildhall School of Music and Drama, which is one of the main drama schools in London where you go when you are older. But I was doing the junior one when I was a kid. And some friends there had agents. I was fourteen and I was like, "I want an agent! It sounds awesome!" I had no idea what that was. I thought those guys looked like men in black. They were hanging around in suits all the time. So I luckily got a very good agent in London and started auditioning. And then when I was 16, I got my first film and I've been working ever since. — Douglas Booth

Whatever expectations I had for myself, none of them have come to pass. I grew up thinking I was going to be an actor, which I am. But I thought I'd be a very serious sort of Shakespearean guy going from town to town having sex with various Juliets all over the country. — Michael Ian Black

In chili's hand were his car keys, Ray-bans and Marlboros, without which he wouldn't leave his bathroom. Chili drank only black coffee and neat Jack Daniel's; his suits were Boss, his underwear Calvin Klein, his actor Pacino. His barber shook his hand, his accountant took him to dinner, his drug dealer would come to him at all hours and accept his checks. — Hanif Kureishi

It's frightening enough with a male actor and not a stunt person. If you accidently punch him with the wrong hand, then you've cost them a week's work and they've got a black eye or a lot of money goes on CG to get rid of it. That was nerve wracking, but it was very civilized. Women tend to immediately take responsibility if somebody messes up with both of us saying it's our fault. Men are quite happy for it to be your fault it seems like. — Kate Beckinsale

I'd rather a young black actor read about success as opposed to how tough it was. I get these roles because I can act and that's it. Hopefully that's it. — Idris Elba

The pilots I did test for, I was the only black actor testing against white actors for parts that were written white. — J. August Richards

One of the things about being a minority actor is that you don't have that opportunity as some of your counterparts to keep that flow, to constantly be going from one thing to the other, so when you see really great performances out there by some black folks, you know it's coming from somewhere deep, because they just don't work as much. — Georg Stanford Brown

I'm kind of in a middle space, being marketed as a biracial actor. Roles are written either stereotypically black, or they're written 'normal,' which is just code for white. — Jesse Williams