A Quote by Rich Sommer

('Mad Men') was my final audition of the pilot season. It had been three miserable, horrible months where I had zero callbacks, zero positive reception, one of those pilot seasons that makes you pretty sure you are never going to be an actor and never want to be an actor. And then that happened.
From an actor's point of view, you never really like to hope that anything will go beyond the pilot. I'd always say to my agent every time I filmed a pilot, 'Great! Well, I'll see you at pilot season.'
I was going to move to New York after college and had no interest in pilot season. I'd seen what happened on TV shows because of my dad, and I didn't want to open myself up to that. But 'Pretty Little Liars' had a very early audition, and my agents encouraged me to go even though I didn't think it would be my thing.
I wasn't really interested in doing anything except going from pilot season to pilot season and sowing my oats in the months between and telling my agency to stop sending me movie scripts, because they'd pile up in my house and make me feel guilty because I had to read them.
As an actor, and as you get to a certain level... and it's pilot season and you read the trades, you could have a nervous breakdown. 'So-and-so's signed for a pilot. Why aren't I?'
I hadn't worked for a year when I had my Prison Break audition and it was the easiest audition I've ever had. I got the script on Friday, went to the audition on Monday and got the part on Tuesday. I was shooting the pilot a week later. I didn't have time to be nervous - it happened so quickly.
I had been reading a lot of pilots. It was pilot season and I had decided, in my mind, that I wanted to do another show, but the bar had already been set so high, having working on Mad Men and Community, that I was really particular. I was looking for something really specific, but I didn't even know exactly what that was. When I read 'Glow', it just checked every box.
The only number that would ever be enough is 0. Zero pounds, zero life, size zero, double-zero, zero point. Zero in tennis is love. I finally get it.
For the last four or five years, I had been in the position where I didn't have to take a pilot. I took this one because the script and the people were terrific. It never frightened me. As we were doing the pilot, I could tell that it was working.
The reason I've never gone for pilot season even as a younger actor, and wouldn't entertain that sort of thing now, is the idea of signing a piece of paper that binds me for six or seven years.
I am sure every movie I've made, even as an actor, had multiple test screenings. And I am sure there have been horrible things written about me. But I never have to see them!
I didn't really want to be an actor when I was growing up - I wanted to be whatever I was reading about or seeing at the time. When I read The Firm I wanted to be a lawyer; when I saw Top Gun, I wanted to be a fighter pilot. So that's why acting probably turned out to be a good thing for me because I get to be people for five minutes or 90 minutes. I'd be curious to see if I had the attention span to be like those guys on 30 Rock and play the same character season after season.
I didn't have a lot of ambition, which I think was a good thing. I mean, I was ambitious about quality, but I wasn't ambitious in the "I've got to get a pilot!" way. I never went out to L.A. for pilot season.
I'd never properly done pilot season in America. I did it for just a couple of weeks, a couple of years ago. Usually, you get pilot scripts and the initial script quality isn't there.
I'm going to go do a Netflix series. It's straight-to-series, 10 episodes, probably go for three seasons. I'm going to direct the pilot and hopefully the last episode of the first season. The show is 'Seven Seconds.'
My dad had been an actor... not only had my dad been an actor, but his dad had been an actor, and my great-grandfather had been an actor. And who knows before then?
I've never taken a job as an actor that I wasn't 100-percent sure I wanted to do. I've never had to think about whether or not I wanted to do something, and there have always been a lot of factors to that. I don't think I'm an actor who's driven by character, to be honest.
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