A Quote by Christian Cooke

I grew up doing plays - I went to a stage school after school - and it's always something that I've wanted to do, but, in a weird way, if you do television and film and you didn't go to drama school and don't have a theatrical background, it's hard to get your foot in the door. In the same way that it is for theater actors to get into television and film. There's a weird prejudice that goes both ways.
I was a poor kid. I grew up watching film and television but primarily television. And I graduated high school, and I knew I wanted to go to college because nobody in my family had. So I was like, 'I'll go and be a theater major.'
When I got out of school, it used to be that it was theater actors that ended up doing film and television, and you had to come from the theater to be taken seriously in that world.
There is a lot of hype about drama school, I think. If you're an actor in England, that's just the way to get into it but I've been so incredibly lucky in that I was brought up in to it. I still might go to drama school, if I wanted to do theater work, definitely. It's a completely different type of training.
Neither my MFA from Yale School of Drama nor my BFA from the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University make me any different from other actors in film, television, or theatre.
You go to drama school, and the people you revere and admire are those who work on the London stage, and you hope that's a world that you'll be able to break into and do enough occasional television and small film work to eventually get to the point where you're paying the bills.
I grew up in Cleveland and started doing plays in high school. And I went to the University of Illinois, and I majored in drama. And after school, I went up to Chicago, because I didn't really know anybody in New York or Los Angeles, and I knew people who were doing plays in Chicago.
I never did theater. I was a theater major at USC my first year because I didn't get into the film school. I was biding my time, hoping to be accepted to film school, and I ended up transferring to UCLA my sophomore year.
Film and television as a medium has only very recently begun to be taught at the great drama schools in the UK. When I was at drama school in the UK, I was there for two and a half years, and we did one week of television and film. It's right before you leave. It's like, "We've taught you Anton Chekhov and William Shakespeare, you are likely to be in a washing-up soap-liquid commercial."
I had been doing all my school plays, elementary school, middle school, and high school, and then summer. I'd wanted to act for a long time, and I thought I was going to go to college and do theater, go that route. But 'Superbad' kind of fell on my lap. I was very, very lucky for that.
When I was a kid, I played basketball religiously. I begged my mom to get me voice lessons because I wanted to learn to sing the right way, but at the same time, I was playing Junior Olympic basketball, and I was playing point guard for my school. But I was wanting to get into entertainment, into music and film and television.
We can't just go, like, oh that'd be cool then not do it. So it's one of those weird things. You gain all these things on your journey. You get smarter. It's interesting how you are who you are in high school in a lot of ways. When I look at my friends, I feel no different about them than I did when I was in high school. I mean that in a great way. They've taken on a micro scale what they were doing and making it bigger.
I went to school to be a psychiatrist. That's where I was going until I had a teacher-student conference with one of my teachers and there were film school pamphlets, and he said, "You don't belong here. Get out. Go to film school."
I was in school, but I wasn't into school. I wasn't doing what I wanted to be doing in school, which was film studies. That was what I intended on doing, but I didn't go away to a university because I wanted to stay in L.A. and audition while I took classes, so I elected to go to a community college and just take G.E. courses. It was terrible.
I didn't go to film school. My Grampa always says just watch a lot of movies. He didn't go to film school; he went to theatre school. It's interesting to learn about the technical side of it, but I think it's more important to learn about writing and working with actors.
I was coming from a theater background. I had an obsession with classic film and cool, interesting, intelligent television. I didn't really understand the way the mainstream television industry worked. I just thought "The wire is so good that it's going to be a huge hit, and we'll get awards up the yin-yang forever." That's what I thought!
When I was trying to find work after drama school in London, it felt like the same actors always got the plum roles, especially in television. We have a smaller market place, vastly fewer drama-producing networks, and they seem to compete for the same established names for those projects.
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