A Quote by Jimmy Smits

I have been in rooms with people arguing over a character that's not really fleshed out: that, just because the surname is Latino, that automatically means you have an accent.
It's really an organic sort of process. You start off with the character on the page. You fall in love with that character and you have to represent that character well and I think it's just an evolution there. Using the accent and speaking the lines with the accent in fact opens the door to who the character really is.
Just because we finally have a Latino family on TV doesn't mean we're up there to lecture people about what it means to be Latino.
Being blonde means people decide on sight that you are much prettier and nicer than you really are, just as Americans automatically add 10 points to someone's IQ when they hear an English accent. Fact.
There's crucial distinction that has to be drawn between the Shari'a, which is this hugely expansive vision of cosmic order that I've been describing, and principles of Islamic law, known in Arabic as "Fiqh" - a word that means understanding. If you're a devout Muslim, you don't argue against the Shari'a; the Shari'a is the path that God has laid down. But what you can do, and what people are doing all the time, is arguing over the correct interpretation of the Shari'a, arguing over the Fiqh. That's something that has been going on throughout Islamic history.
If you are playing a Hispanic character who has to speak in dialect or in an accent, nail that dialect or accent. When I hear a character that's supposed to be Cuban speaking with a Mexican accent or vice versa, it grates on me and immediately pulls me out of the story.
I'm aware now over the last 5 or 10 years that when you do an accent, you really have to kind of get down to the nitty gritty and go into the phonetics of it, if necessary. Find out not just the sounds but the rhythms and the music - or lack thereof - in a particular accent.
I broke into acting doing Latino roles. I played a Latino casanova in 'The Winner' and a Latino character on 'Hannah Montana.'
It's interesting: I think, as a Latino actor, the biggest challenge is being called 'Latino' because immediately, the world has a perception of what that means.
I believe ability can get you to the top,” says coach John Wooden, “but it takes character to keep you there.… It’s so easy to … begin thinking you can just ‘turn it on’ automatically, without proper preparation. It takes real character to keep working as hard or even harder once you’re there. When you read about an athlete or team that wins over and over and over, remind yourself, ‘More than ability, they have character.'
I feel like that for the next album, we're going to know what we're doing for each song even more than what we did for this one, just because we'll have really fleshed them out as a band before recording.
We're told that independent film lovers... folks that are used to watching art house films, won't come out and see a film with black people in it - I've been told that in rooms, big rooms, studio rooms, and I know that's not true.
I think people are really picky about English accents. When a Brit comes over here and kind of does an OK American accent, everyone's like, 'You were great! Fantastic!' But in England, even if you were doing a pretty good accent, they're like, 'But where are you from?' 'London.' 'What part of London?' Accents are really precious over there.
I guess when I first started speaking with an American accent, there's a tendency to create a caricature of the accent because you just exaggerate the pieces that stand out to you.
Coming in and out of Hollywood for pilot season, I may have to thicken my accent or hear that, physically, I'm not Latino. I not only am, but there's another 50,000 people who look exactly like me.
Early on, people told me I was making Chinese people look bad. I've been living with this accent. I had already been doing standup for a while. I knew my voice already. I myself never wanted to make my accent the butt of the joke. I never want it to be, 'I'm laughing at your accent.'
Every character, if fleshed out properly, is being taken seriously.
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