Quotes & Sayings About Black Actors

Only black people in the whole neighborhood, so let's break it down: Me, I'm a decent comedian, I'm a'ight. Mary J. Blige, one of the greatest R&B singers to ever walk the Earth. Jay-Z, one of the greatest rappers to ever live. Eddie Murphy, one of the funniest actors to ever, ever do it. Do you know what the white man that lives next door to me does for a living? He's a f*****g dentist. — Chris Rock

I am admiring of my fellow peers, black filmmakers and black actors and actresses. — Cuba Gooding Jr.

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

I ruffle a lot of feathers. And I'm also selective - that makes you a troublemaker. But so be it. I laid a cornerstone for black actors, and that makes me happy. — Esther Rolle

Republicans are just rich, old, white people - that's all they are. You ever see the Republican National Convention? All white people - six black people: paid actors. James Earl Jones in his most difficult, challenging role! Tune in and attempt to watch him look pleased during a George Bush speech. And Clarence Thomas - as himself. — Andy Kindler

My goal is to work. That's the goal of most actors or performers: to work and keep working, and do the best you can, and keep growing and changing, trying to improve your craft. — Michael Ian Black

You don't pick black actors or black directors because they are black. You pick them because they are good. If you lend somebody 50 million dollars you want you're money back. You don't care if they are oppressed. You just want you're money back. — Denzel Washington

My husband and I are writers, and I wish I could write faster. There are not a lot of movies made with black actors in mind. — Gina Prince-Bythewood

If you put on a lousy production with white actors, it's lousy. There is a problem, or can be, at this stage of our social evolution, with mixing the casts. It may not be a question of race so much as class. You would rarely find a black man in a high executive position where he was swinging his weight around. — Howard Schultz

But George Lucas is carrying about Black actors, about Black men, about Black history, which really incorporates and tells all of history. You can't take one race out without eliminating every other race if you're going to tell the story of the human race. — Terrence Howard

Garrel has succeeded in filming something we have never seen before: the faces of actors in silent films during those moments when the black intertitles, with their paltry, illuminated words, filled the screen. — Serge Daney

It's a tough transition really for theater actors to adjust to television or film, and all of these years later, I still have a tendency to play it too big. — Jack Black

Hollywood is designed to check the box office on Monday morning and see: "How'd we do? How much?" It's another facet of this whole culture of accumulation and consumption. Black people are caught up in it, white people are caught up in it, white actors, black actors, female actresses - everybody's caught up in it. — Danny Glover

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

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

Are there differences between black actors' opportunities and white actors' opportunities? Yes, there are. It's been said. — Idris Elba

They were in love with him because he was a prince and a faerie and magical and you were supposed to love princes and faeries and magic people. They loved him the way they'd loved Beast the first time he swept Belle around the dance floor in her yellow dress. They loved him as they loved the Eleventh Doctor with his bow tie and his flippy hair and the Tenth Doctor with his mad laugh. They loved him as they loved lead singers of bands and actors in movies, loved him in such a way that their shared love brought them closer together. — Holly Black

I imagine it was much different in the 1970s. That was the Renaissance for black actors, albeit in blaxploitation movies. There was a much greater preponderance of work then than there is now. — Don Cheadle

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

If this were a courageous country,
it would ask Gloria to lead it
since she is sane and funny and beautiful and smart
and the National Leaders we've always had
are not.
When I listen to her talk about women's rights
children's rights
men's rights
I think of the long line of Americans
who should have been president, but weren't.
Imagine Crazy Horse as president. Sojourner Truth.
John Brown. Harriet Tubman. Black Elk or Geronimo.
Imagine President Martin Luther King confronting
the youthful "Oppie" Oppenheimer. Imagine President
Malcolm X going after the Klan. Imagine President Stevie
Wonder dealing with the "Truly Needy."
Imagine President Shirley Chisholm, Ron Dellums, or
Sweet Honey in the Rock
dealing with Anything.
It is imagining to make us weep with frustration,
as we languish under real estate dealers, killers,
and bad actors. — Alice Walker

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

There are a lot of limitations and stigmas that are placed on young actors, specifically young black actors. — Anthony Mackie

We can never know ... But maybe it's because no black actors merited being nominated.Why put people into categories? — Charlotte Rampling

Showtime has given new, young filmmakers - black, white, across the board - an opportunity to make films, as well as actors who want to cross over into directing. — Morris Chestnut

You always see actors complaining about being typecast and ruining their career. Really, I don't see the point in complaining. If the only role you can play well is a black dude, you're never going to get ahead in this town, and you should just accept it. — Zach Braff

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

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

There is a class system in acting just like in anything else. Black females fall in a category below black male actors. — Debra Wilson

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

I've got a black woolen hat and it's got Pervert written across the front of it. It's the name of the clothing label. And I was with my wife and my baby at the supermarket and I didn't think. I just put my hat on Clara's head, because it was cold. And the looks. I couldn't figure out why I was getting death looks. And then I realized my 10-month old baby's wearing a hat with the word Pervert written on it and these people were like, 'There's Satan! There's Satan out with his kid!' And then I made a point of her wearing it every time we went there. — Ewan McGregor

I don't have to sympathize or empathize with a human being in order to be able to portray them. I mean, some of the greatest roles that actors have been able to play haven't been the most endearing on screen. — Dustin Lance Black

I don't differentiate between black and Latino actors. We're in the same struggle to be represented in a way that's even close to honest. And I can tell you that the amount of Latino characters I can point at and say, 'That's what my life experience looks like' - I can't think of any off the top of my head besides Jimmy Smits in 'Mi Familia.' — Lin-Manuel Miranda

If I or any other black can deliver at the box office, I'll get a lot of work. Too many young actors, regardless of their color, try to play an attitude on camera and fail to remember their job is to fit into an entertainment. — Mario Van Peebles

My favourite actors are all dead or dying. I just love Jimmy Stewart, Bette Davis, Katharine Hepburn - I was named after her - and Cary Grant. I just love old black and white movies and the stars in them. It must have been a great time to be in Hollywood. — Katharine Isabelle

I walked out on American Gangster: this evil piece of dreck. Defenders of this junk say that these movies give Black actors jobs. So did "Birth of a Nation." — Ishmael Reed

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

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

With just about every script, in almost every corner of the set, I was faced with the truth: This was my parents' life. My mother had sat in handcuffs; my father had once worn an orange jumpsuit like the dozens that sat folded in our wardrobe department. For the other actors and me on our show, this was all fantasy, the re-creation of a world we knew little about; for Mami and Papi, it could not have been any more real or painful...I've had so many scenes in which Flaca & I are doing the dirty work, like cleaning the kitchen or mopping the floors, which is when I think of my parents most. Long before they ended up in prison, they'd spent years handling the nastiest jobs, the ones often avoided by others. Manual labor. Low pay. No respect. They must've felt so trapped. It must've been so hard for them to maintain their dignity when others looked down on them or, worse, didn't see them at all. — Diane Guerrero

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. — Tyrese Gibson

All actors bring something unexpected to the role because they have to translate what's on the page and make a real character out of the black-and-white text that's there in the script. — Joe Johnston

I like to watch people. For example, people at the airport ... What is interesting about them is that they dont know what they are like. People at airports are the most brilliant actors in the world, because their attention is elsewhere, and they are idiosyncratic. I like to imitate people. I walk behind them and imitate their backs. — Karen Black

The great thing about being the son of Maya Angelou is that I had the good fortune to grow up around some of the greatest black artists, dancers, singers, musicians, and actors of our time. — Guy Johnson

I like to work and there's no movies for actors, period, especially black actors. When white actors are like, 'Man, there's no work out there,' then black actors are like, 'Are you kidding me?' — Marlon Wayans

I got out of the Army - in my world - I came to New York, for instance, when the civil rights movement was just beginning, and that created a certain energy, a certain rumble, a certain impetus for black actors. — James Earl Jones

Black actors on the road, flying around the country working as poets. Those people are inspirations for millions of kids who write. — Russell Simmons

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

There are loads of black actors.You can't say: I'm going to vote for him, he's not very good but he's black, [so] I'll vote for him. You've got to give a good performance. — Michael Caine