34 Chadwick Boseman Quotes to Inspire Your Day

1. “When you play characters, you shouldn’t just be putting on their characteristics – you should be finding it inside yourself.”

2. “The projects that I end up doing, that I want to be involved with in any way, have always been projects that will be impactful, for the most part, to my people – to black people.”

3. “When it comes down to it, I’d rather have an action figure than a Golden Globe.”

4. “Even after I became involved in theater and involved in TV and film, I had this sort of idea that Hollywood was off limits. There was something about L.A., the mystique of it and fear of it.”

5. “Every year, Hollywood is looking for that new, white leading man and new white starlet that audiences fall in love with. But they’re not looking for the next Denzel Washington, Will Smith or Sidney Poitier.”

6. “Each movie you do about a real person is like a painting, and you choose certain things in the painting that you want to pull out and you want to show.”

7. “I started out as a writer and a director. I started acting because I wanted to know how to relate to the actors. When people ask me what I do, I don’t really say that I’m an actor, because actors often wait for someone to give them roles.”

8. “Actors can have a fair amount of hate for each other, so when another actor says, ‘You did your thing,’ or ‘That was inspiring,’ you can’t really ask for more than that.”

9. “When you’re doing a character, you want to know the full landscape. You want to know them spiritually, mentally and physically.”

10. “People have said, ‘You don’t need to do any more biopics. You don’t need to play any more real people.’ I don’t agree with that.”

11. “I think there’s a difference between a working actor, a movie star and a celebrity. They’re all three different things.”

12. “One of the first things I was taught as an actor was, ‘Don’t judge the character.'”

13. “I would love to have an ocean of love right now. That said, the number-one rule of acting is, ‘Do not seek approval from the audience.’ People don’t realize that. You can’t do stuff to get applause. You have to live in the truth.”

14. “Sometimes when you’re acting, you only need a little bit of something to sort of channel or, you know, transport into a place.”

15. “As a director, it is important to understand the actor’s process.”

16. “I try to look at every role the same way, regardless of whether the character is real or the character is a fantasy. I always start from myself, because you have to know yourself first.”

17. “Once you start getting big roles as an actor, everything pays. So what are you making decisions on? It’s about the director or the script or whatever. But before you reach that point, you’re taking jobs with, say, a theater company, in spite of the fact that it’s not paying your bills.”

18. “You’re not free unless you can show the good and the bad, all sides of them. So to me, when I play a character, it’s important that I can show every aspect of them.”