Top 115 Quotes & Sayings by Judd Nelson - Page 2

Voice-over stuff is so much fun because you don't have hair and makeup and wardrobe. You get to show up. And there were some talented people, and we don't even know them. And they're so gifted. They can do all these accents and voices. It's really fun to do that stuff. It's really like actor camp.

[John Hurt] just really gifted, and I had a great time working with him and [am] very lucky to have worked with him.

John Hurt was incredible to work with.

I would go to trials a lot in Boston, as best I could. And it's incredible that, like, lawyers that had a good case weren't dramatic at all. Lawyers that had a horrible case would sing and dance and do whatever it took to convince the jury or the judge that this guy was innocent. So that was a cool thing to see because that made me believe that what the script [of From The Hip] was doing was totally believable. Now, maybe not ordinary. But it could happen.

I was just in a few episodes the first season [ of Empire]. They didn't kill me, but I haven't been back in season two or three. I don't know if they have plans for me or not. But I enjoyed working on it. And I think it's a really talented group of actors and, boy, very enterprising to try and shoot those every week, you know, with musical numbers and all that stuff.

It's a profession where merit is not necessarily rewarded.

[In The Dark Backward ] someone who has writer's block and kills people in A Cabin By The Lake. I guess he's a type of serial killer, but I don't know.

Breakfast Club was great because we had a real rehearsal, and we shot primarily in sequence. I thought that was going to be how movies were done. I didn't really know how lucky we all were. We had a director that liked actors. I didn't know that was going to be rare.

Paul Gleason he was a great guy. I loved working with him.

I play a garbage man who moonlights as a stand-up comedian. Terrible.

I like Chicago. It's a great city. It's always fun to revisit it.

[Kevin] Costner said, "You don't have to do that... this is a wide shot, so you can calm down."

The first animation thing I did was the first Transformers, the one that was animated many years ago. And I had heard that Orson Welles was doing a voice on it.

I think I was, like, 23 or something [on The Breakfast Club]. I was the oldest of the five. Emilio [Estevez] and Ally [Sheedy] were a year younger. The only real difference was that Molly [ Ringwald] and Michael [Hall] still had to go to school. They could shoot, like, a half day. So a lot of my close coverage was done with Molly's stand-in, so Molly could do her schoolwork.

I wanted to meet Orson Welles. So I was like, whatever, somehow get me in on this. I'm able to get cast in it, but Orson Welles worked alone. He worked before all of us worked. He didn't want to work with anyone else.

I was trained by Stella Adler for theater so you kind of give it all on every take.

Ice-T was just a pleasure to work with. He was a smart gentleman.

Fandango is not really a Western. It's really just set in Texas. It's a road picture. And then I did one that hasn't come out yet called Kreep, which is set in Texas, but it's not really a Western. But it has a more rural-Texas feel to it.

As a kid, I had a crush on Sophia Loren and Raquel Welch.

I went to acting school in New York City for two years. I studied with Stella Adler

You just have to learn certain technical things, like where the camera is, not to block people's light in your own, to hit your marks, and that you do it kind of piecemeal.

You can do crap work in a big movie, and it does good things. You can do great work in a movie no one sees, it does nothing. That's the way it goes.

Santa Jr. I was a cop. Yes, I was officially Santa. But a younger Santa. He goes young, clean-shaven, to how we imagine Santa with all the white hair and beard and "Ho ho ho." Kind of funny.

As they were building that library in that school's gym [in the Breakfast Club], they built a rehearsal space for us. It was really an empty room taped out with the same dimensions of the library. And they had the tables all there. And he had us sitting at the same table. All of us.

I wasn't Santa in Santa Jr., but I was Santa in Cancel Christmas.

Breakfast Club was great because we had a real rehearsal, and we shot primarily in sequence.

I worked with the late Leonard Frey. I did a play, and I would have these ideas and he would say, "I don't know. Try it." And I would try it and it would be awful, and he would go, "What do you think?" And I would go, "It was awful." And he goes, "Okay, we'll try something else." And that's great because it really makes you feel less working-for and more working-with. There's nothing better than to feel a part of the team.

It's strange, 'cause a play, you start at the beginning and you go all the way through to the end. So it's naturally very well rehearsed and you get a rhythm and a flow. In film, you can shoot the ending before the beginning. It's very odd. And it's like a craft you have to learn.

I went and saw him [ John Hurt ] here in L.A.He did a one-man Beckett show of Krapp's Last Tape. I went back and saw him afterwards, and what an actor he is. He is so gifted.

Stagecoach is really my first Western, actually.

I remember Emilio [Estevez] and I were at John's house during the rehearsal process. And John [Huges] had mentioned he wrote the first draft of Breakfast Club in a weekend. And we both at the same time went, "First draft? How many do you have?" And John said he's got four other drafts. And we go, "Can we read them?" And for the next three hours, Emilio and I read those other four drafts.

[John] Hughes really wanted it to sound authentic. He was a real collaborator. He encouraged us to bring to the material things we thought were maybe more truthful.

I got to play Santa, too. It's really important to play Santa, you know.

It's like they talk about how American actors have the method and English actors just kind of switch views faster. And John [Hurt] is telling me the story as he's sitting in that witness chair, and they're putting the final touches of makeup on. And he goes, "Hold on a second," to stop his story so he can do the take. And he does this incredible take. They go, "Cut." And then immediately John goes, "Anyways, so Alec, he's playing the chess." And I'm just going, "Holy crap." You get whiplash from those kinds of quick turns!

You have to be so confident and so gifted to fill five minutes of nothing at the very beginning of a play before even a word is uttered.

[John] Hughes was well aware that to ignore the seriousness of young people is to encourage things like Columbine, so you might want to listen. And we were all pretty serious, a little bit, in high school. Some a little more than others.

[John] Hughes is a great loss, I think. He was the first filmmaker that could look at someone who was young without seeing them as being less.

[John] Hughes was open to that [rehearsal]. This can only happen if the director and/or the writer are open to that.

There were a few things that, in rehearsal, any one of us might try. [John] Hughes would go, "I like that," to me spitting up in the air and catching it in my mouth. It was just something I did in a rehearsal and Molly [ Ringwald] went, "Ewww." And John went, "Can you do that again?" And I went all day long, and he was like, "Okay, let's do that."

It was an audition process after Breakfast Club, and I wasn't really sure I wanted to do the movie. There was a bigger role that Rob [Lowe] was already set to play, so the role they wanted me to audition for was Alec. [Director] Joel Schumacher... this is back in the days when you could trick me with things like this. He goes, "Don't you think you can play it?" And I go, "Okaaaaay." So then I did it for all the wrong reasons but I don't think I would fall for that again. Who knows. I might.

If you read a script enough, especially a good script - I try to read it 40 to 50 times before you begin so you get a sense of the arc: what happens before, what happens after, what happens during.

You know who was wonderful to work with? Was Paul Gleason, may he rest in peace.

[St. Elmo's Fire] it was pretty soon after that. I know we didn't do Breakfast Club knowing we were going to do that.

Trace Adkins doesn't talk too much, but when he does he's got great stories. He's lived a great life.

It's more like the inner workings of John Bender. He feels like he's been given a short shrift, he's not been provided the opportunities that maybe these other kids have. So he feels like he begins in a hole. And instead of trying to raise himself up, he wants to bring all of them down. That's a dynamic that's pretty universal. And so that was the real foothold on that. It wasn't like, "Oh, my high school experience is like John Bender's [in St. Elmo's Fire]."

In a good script, it's really like a treasure map. You just focus on that, all the answers are pretty much in it.

Kim Coates is really funny. He's a blast. If you have to get beaten up and tortured, he's a good guy to get tortured by.

You get the sense that [John] Hughes is so right about the way groups divide and then divide again and then sometimes align and then sometimes break apart. And this idea that Michael Hall's character says, "On Monday, are we going to be friends?" you know, based on this.

The Dark Backward. Bill Paxton is in it with me. Wayne Newton. James Caan. Adam Rifkin wrote and directed it. It was made a number of years ago and very odd. Not for the squeamish.

Phil Hicks was the guy that was in the ROTC, that was going to go into the Vietnam War and thought that was the responsibility of the citizen.

Paul Gleason played the teacher. I just tortured him as best I could. 'Cause he wasn't one of the kids, you know, so it was okay. He was great.

We tried the first evening to go down Division Street and Rush Street, but we couldn't get in anywhere because they didn't like [ Emilio Estevez] sneakers and they didn't like my boots. This was 1983 or '84, so it was ridiculous. We ended up at a jazz club, where you go downstairs and there's a very cool place.

There was no one really like John Bender at my high school.

I don't know if one's more typecasting than the other, or what I am more like. But I know that the high school I went to was a private school. It was prep school. It was a boarding school. So we didn't have a shop class. We didn't have Saturday detention. We went to school on Saturday. We did have Sunday study, which you very rarely get, because then you have 13 straight days of school. Who wants that?

Trace Adkins is such a great guy. Really is. And he's got that incredible voice - low, deep. He throws words around like "my dental coverage."