Change is vital to any actor. If you keep playing lead after lead, you're really gonna dry up. Because all those vehicles wean you away from the truths of human behaviour.
Interpretation
Embracing diverse roles is essential for an actor's growth and authenticity.
In this quote, Gary Oldman emphasizes the importance of change and variety in an actor's career. By continuously taking on different roles, actors can stay connected to the complexities of human behavior, avoiding stagnation and honing their craft through new experiences.
In practice
A motivational speech for aspiring actors to embrace diverse roles.
I drank for about 25 years getting over the loss of my father and I took the anger out on myself. I did a good job at beating myself up at sometimes. I don't drink anymore but my alcoholic head occasionally says different. 'Nil By Mouth' was a love letter to my father because I needed to resolve some issues in order to be able to forgive him.
The thing a drama school can't give you is instinct. It can sharpen instinct but that can't be taught, and you have to have intuition. It's an essential ingredient.
There's no handbook for parenting. So you walk a very fine line as a parent because you are civilizing these raw things. They will tip the coffee over and finger-paint on the table. At some point, you have to say, 'We're gonna have to clean that up because you don't paint with coffee on a table.'
I wanted to play Dracula because I wanted to say: 'I've crossed oceans of time to find you.' It was worth playing the role just to say that line.
Getting sober was one of the three pivotal events in my life, along with becoming an actor and having a child. Of the three, finding my sobriety was the hardest thing.
Remember travel agents? Remember how they just kind of vanished one day? Well, that's where all the other jobs that once made us middle class are going, to that same magical, class-killing, job-sucking wormhole into which travel agency jobs vanished, never to return.
Nothing endures but change. There is nothing permanent except change. All is flux, nothing stays still.
It is hard to let old beliefs go. They are familiar. We are comfortable with them and have spent years building systems and developing habits that depend on them. Like a man who has worn eyeglasses so long that he forgets he has them on, we forget that the world looks to us the way it does because we have become used to seeing it that way through a particular set of lenses. Today, however, we need new lenses. And we need to throw the old ones away.
To preserve the human race, it is now necessary to reorganize society. To this end, an Authority must be created with the power to control human population, to redistribute food, to purify air, water, soil, to re-pattern the cities.
The more exposure people have to the realities of factory farming, the more we will see people rejecting it. It's already happening.
We are 25 years too late. If the object is to avoid dangerous change, we've already had it. The object now is to avoid really dangerous change.
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