A Quote by Martha Kelly

Acting is completely different from the standup world. You have these 12- or 14-hour days, but you have a great time doing it. It's like hanging out with your friends. — © Martha Kelly
Acting is completely different from the standup world. You have these 12- or 14-hour days, but you have a great time doing it. It's like hanging out with your friends.
Doing a sitcom is like doing a play - you rehearse for three or four days, and then you shoot what you rehearsed on Friday night in front of an audience. An hour-long drama is like shooting a movie. You're shooting 13-14 hour days. The endurance itself is different.
I'm a standup comedian who gets to act. I'm never going to not do standup. I love doing it and when I go through periods where I'm doing a lot of acting work, I still do standup.
Standup led me to acting because I liked standup, and I saw people on a stage, and the closest, nearest thing to me was doing plays. It was like, that's the same thing as standup - people are on a stage; they're being seen and saying things - so, because of my love of standup, I moved towards acting.
When I was doing standup, I always wanted to get out of the standup world and take it back into the theatrical world, like with "No Cure For Cancer."
When I was doing standup, I always wanted to get out of the standup world and take it back into the theatrical world, like with 'No Cure For Cancer.'
On American sets, you work 12-, 14-, 16-hour days sometimes. All that volume over a short course of time can actually be less conducive to telling a story accurately.
Writing for film is so different; it's such an act of submission, both on a monetary and time level, because you basically kind of have to just set everything else aside - it's like suddenly getting a temp job that requires you to work 16-hour days. Also just aesthetically, you have to completely leave all of your ego out of it.
I managed to stay grounded and when I wasn't working, I was hanging out with my friends so I was still able to be a kid and have that part of my life. I didn't let acting take over completely.
I was born in the theatre. My father was a small time impresario on the West Coast and I was acting from the age of 7, but I started to write when I was 12 and by the time I was 14 I was making more money than I was acting.
There are some times when you make films and you travel places, and the take that people in the business have is that the worst way to see a city is to shoot there, because you work these long 12, 13 and 14-hour days, and you go home to the hotel, you eat, and you pass out.
It really was a true test to try to act for 14-hour days when people don't think that you're acting.
The actual time you're acting is miniscule compared to the time you're getting ready to do the work. The big difference on series television is, there's not a lot of hanging-out time. You're pumping those pages out, you're doing six, seven, eight pages a day. And I like that pace.
I like to take things as they come and, as much as possible, not force anything. I think I could wind up somewhere completely different five years from now, something completely removed from acting - I could be perfectly content studying photography or English literature. At the same time, I love what I'm doing right now and could see doing this for a very long time.
You don't get to see your family much. In the movie business, directors often go out of town for long periods of time, and even if you're in town, you're working 14-15 hour days. People tend to not balance out the important things in their lives with their career.
I feel like there's this great balance between me being an actress and traveling around and doing all this great stuff but, also, me being the regular teenager, like going to Disneyland with friends and just hanging out.
It's not so much less pressure, it's less work, which is really exciting to me. I'm just personally looking forward to being able to spend a little more time doing different things, so that's really great. Jay and I are writing a book this year which is really fun and so yeah, I am very excited to spend less crazy 12-hour days on set. Those were taxing times.
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