A Quote by Jennifer Jason Leigh
I love acting, but I am a mom, and the roles just weren't coming because of a mixture of things: because I'm not ambitious, and because I'm older, and I had a baby. I really felt like I had said a graceful and completely happy goodbye to acting in a significant way. And I had sort of made my peace with that.
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I've probably had my best time acting - or not acting, or trying to not act - on things like 'The Low Down' or 'Treacle Jr.' I'm happiest doing things like that. Not just because they're lead roles, but because there's more freedom in them.
I went into acting because I had to make a good living. I had a child now and I had to support him any way I could... I wasn't happy, but I wasn't unhappy. I was just doing what I had to do to survive.
I got into acting as a young child on account of a sort of arbitrary thing. A friend of my mom's was a casting director, so really, as kind of a lark, I had a couple of acting jobs that had just enough exposure to give me the option to continue if I wanted to. I followed through with it.
As an actor, it made me realize a really important lesson. I didn't have to put any spin on the ball as Rita [in Dexter]. All I had to do was speak. And there was such simplicity in that as an actor. With Debra, I was trying to put a square peg into a round hole, and it just didn't work, but in my mind, because I had to work so hard on it, I was, like, "Oh, this is acting!" But that's not acting.
The scene I had just witnessed (a couple making love in the ocean) brought back a lot of memories – not of things I had done but of things I had failed to do, wasted hours and frustrated moments and opportunities forever lost because time had eaten so much of my life and I would never get it back. I envied Yeoman and felt sorry for myself at the same time, because I had seen him in a moment that made all my happiness seem dull.
I've really been sort of focused on acting and I feel really lucky because great projects sort of keep coming my way. I guess the criteria that I look for, it gets increasingly difficult because when you have the privilege of working with someone like Diane [Keaton], it's kind of like, 'Well, where do you go from there.'
I was attached to star in a project that was going to be an unbelievable character piece, to be showcased all over the world. It was everything I had been working toward and had suffered for. I had two months to prep and pretty much bankrupted myself in the process. A week before I was supposed to get on the plane, the whole project fell apart. Not only did it leave me completely broke and out of work, but I felt as if I had been betrayed by acting. Acting is not just something I love but a part of who I am. I was shattered. Thankfully, the love of those around me helped push me forward.
I think I'm good with actors. I like directing actors. I also like to show up and just do an acting gig. Where I'm just a hired gun, I don't have to have an opinion on anything.I never got involved in all this stuff because I wanted to control stuff; I got involved in writing and producing because I wasn't getting interesting acting gigs. In a way I'm grateful that I didn't get interesting roles, because it made me pull my finger out and do some work.
In my career, I am so so happy and grateful for everything I've gotten to do. And yet, I wish I had started off earlier so I could, I don't know... I certainly have not not gotten work because of my age, but I'm just gonna pray and hope that the roles will still keep coming as I get older.
When I got signed, I had just turned 16. I felt like I had to continuously have these confrontations with older men who were doubting my ideas because I was a woman, because I was 16.
With acting, I felt like I had a lot to prove because I didn't study it; I didn't work my way up in a traditional sense.
I did community theater and kids programs at professional theaters and plays at school and voice lessons for seven years. I stopped because it was so time-consuming. But then I realized that I had access to this world where I could go on auditions. And there wasn't too much of an identity crisis when I started acting professionally because I had been acting longer than I had been writing. It didn't feel new.
I'd always thought that acting was, like, you had to work really hard, you had to change the way you walked, you talked, and all of that. But that's not acting. That's shmacting.
I've had a job since I was 11. I had a paper route, I worked at a video store, I was a toy doll at FAO Schwartz when I was in high school. And I think that it's made me really disciplined when it came to pursuing acting, because I had no clue how to go about it.
I feel really lucky because I discovered acting when I was really young, I was like nine and I think I had a really happy childhood and youth. I was doing what I wanted.
I had an acting career for a little while back in the '90s. I had gotten into that because I was interested in acting, but I was not really as centered as I needed to be to fully pursue that career, and I was doing some films I thought were not of the best quality.
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