A Quote by Ving Rhames

Quite honestly I never had a desire to be an actor. I tell people, I did not choose acting; acting chose me. I never grew up wanting to be an actor. I wanted to play football. In about 9th grade an English teacher told me I had a talent to act. He said I should audition for a performing arts high school so I did on a whim. I got accepted.
Quite honestly I never had a desire to be an actor. I tell people, 'I did not choose acting; acting chose me.' I never grew up wanting to be an actor. I wanted to play football.
In about 9th grade, an English teacher told me I had a talent to act. He said I should audition for a performing arts high school, so I did on a whim. I got accepted. Then I got accepted at the Julliard School, and by then, I was serious about it.
I wouldn't be an actor if it weren't for the English teacher I had my junior year in high school. She's the one who told me I could be an actor. I had never met an actor, I had never seen a real play, only high school plays. I didn't know actors were real, that it was a real job.
In high school, I did some musicals, but I never took acting until college. I was studying opera, classical voice, and a speech teacher asked me to audition for this play, and I got the lead.
I had said bye-bye to acting, in a way, but once an actor, always an actor. Life has got other plans for me. Like, I did not want to be an actor - I wanted to be an architect or astronaut - and 'Daddy' happened, and the rest is history.
Miss Goodblatt would call on me to read. She said I had a talent. So on a whim, I auditioned for the High School of Performing Arts in Manhattan.
When I was about 12, I came home from middle school and told my parents I wanted to be an actor. My father didn't say it to me, but he told my mom, 'No. I'm not going to allow that. He'll starve to death.' I grew up in a small town in Illinois where being an actor was not something people did.
I went away to this summer program after my junior year of high school. They used to have this thing called the Governor's School, and they had it for different disciplines - science, math, performing arts. I auditioned and I got accepted, and it was an eight-week program away from home. I went for acting. I was 15, and I turned 16 while I was there, so that was a seminal moment for me. It made me realize the life of it, the discipline of it, and the joy of that discipline, where it was all we did.
I did my first play in fifth grade. This same fifth grade teacher asked me several years later what I wanted to do when I grew up. I knew the most fun I'd had was doing the play in her class, so when I told her that, she began to take me to local theater auditions and became my mentor and friend, and to this day continues to be.
I discovered that I wanted to be an actor back when I did my first play in junior high. I've been doing theater in junior high and high school, and I just kept feeding the fire, kept wanting to pursue acting full-on.
If you had asked me back in grade school what I wanted to be when I grew up, I would have said my first choice was an actor, but if I couldn't be that, I'd want to be a superhero.
I wanted to be an actor ever since I was five. My grandparents - my mom's parents in New York - were stage actors. I think indirectly I wanted to do it because of them. My grandfather would tell me stories about Tennessee Williams and actors he worked with in New York. He had such a respect for acting and such a love for storytelling about that world. I grew up hearing him tell tales of it.They were never encouraging me or discouraging me to take part. They were always feeding me with theater.
I had a teacher at school who said, 'We are going to do a play next year, and you're in it.' He said, 'You should try out for the Royal Academy as an actor.' I did and got in. I was 17. My mum wasn't too happy, but it worked out OK.
I was born in Japan, and I grew up in England, and I wanted to be an actor when I was a child because I had an uncle who was an actor. I wanted to do everything he did, and he told me to learn how to dance first. So then I learned how to dance.
Toward the end of 11th grade, my acting teacher asked me if I was thinking about going to college. I said, 'Yeah, I think so.' He said, 'You should audition to Julliard.' I was like, 'What's that?' I'm accepted to Julliard, and I realize within the first couple of weeks just how lucky I was to be in the program.
As an actor, I was not accepted for the longest time. But it did not deter me, as the audience had accepted me. I never compared myself with any other actors. I never had any game plan and took whatever came my way.
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