A Quote by Toby Stephens

'Black Sails' was an amazing experience, but it was a really tough show for me to do. After four years, it was pretty exhausting because it was such a huge production.
It was actually pretty cool to be in Pittsburgh for those four years. I moved into the dorms and had a pretty normal college experience, even though it was in my hometown. I really thrived there. I feel like it really suited me and served me well in terms of how I grew up there.
After four years of experience - and especially after the match with Daniel Bryan at WrestleMania 27 for the U.S. title that ended up being a dark match - you've got to realize that patience is a huge key in this game.
It's really a great experience to be able to work on a large production, traveling around like a family, setting up for an amazing show, and all having the same purpose.
I'm starting on Cirque du Soleil Michael Jackson show. So it's the equivalent of the Beatles' Love show they have, or the Elvis show. Which is exciting and terrifying all at the same time because it's such a huge responsibility. But that's why I took it on, because Mike was such a huge part of my career and life. we were friends for 20 years before he passed, since I was seven. So it's an opportunity for me to give back a little bit to his legacy.
I don't have any huge desire to show you all that I'm not tough and strong, that I'm all feminine and soft. That's not a huge longing that I have because I know who I am.
My first ten years in Hollywood were really tough. I'd be coaching friends who came to me for acting advice, and then they'd make it before I did. I'd still be helping them while they were on movie sets and I had four lines on a TV show.
I had 11 years of managerial experience and four years of coaching before I managed a big-league team. To me, it was important, because I learned a lot through trial and error. And it's tough to have to go through trial and error when you're a big-league manager.
I looked pretty crazy but at the time, you don't think anything of it. You think, "I've got an amazing job. I'm working and this is cool." I remember I was being fit to go to a premiere for something at Burberry and Christopher Bailey, who designs the clothes there, saw a picture of me and I looked weird. I had short black hair, hardly any eyebrows, I looked very very thin and he went, "We need to put Douglas in a campaign." So four days later, I was shooting a Burberry campaign because he had seen me looking crazy from the show so that was kind of funny.
With Dazed and Confused I got the high school experience I didn't get to have. So you do create families and homes. You're projecting and it's your job. The amount of time and headspace and thought it takes on your psyche is huge. It's exhausting, yeah. And it's exhausting but it's also great.
You can show up at Everest having never really climbed before, because it's like hiking, basically. You can't show up on Meru and start up the thing unless you have years and years of experience. Climbing and spending time on the mountains is really the only way you can train.
I wanted to quit the industry when I was eighteen and finish '70s', finish my contract on the show and go to college because I was pretty convinced that after '70s' and after being on a show for eight years that I would be very much pigeonholed for something specific that I didn't want to be a part of anymore.
For me, it shouldn't just be a live show: it should be an experience. It should be some kind of crazy, tribal, exhausting experience.
When I was thinking about what we could do in terms of what production values of Broadway might be able to add to the show, I had this thought that it would be really cool if we had a coup de théâtre. What would they want? And then I was like, an amazing, enormous tuna puppet that was like 30 by 40 feet would be pretty incredible. So I called up Basil Twist, and he got really excited immediately and started sketching out his idea, and I think it's a real highlight of the show.
For me 'Submarine', is probably one of the most important things I've done and it will always remain the closest thing to my heart. It was an amazing experience and it really changed things for me after I'd finished filming it because of the people on it.
They used to call me Firefly when I was a little girl, and I always tried to figure out why I was being called a firefly. I was really black, black, black from the sun. After being in Jamaica for 13 years, my eyes were really beady and white, and my skin was really black. I must have really looked like a fly. My eyes looked like lights, like stars.
I've learned through experience that you can't ever predict what's going to happen with any show. When I signed on to 'Ugly Betty,' I just prayed that I wouldn't get fired after the pilot, and four years later, I was still doing it.
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