Actors From Vancouver

"In a movie, however, you might see an actor playing a character, and the actor may be a super grumpy person in real life, and that will, of course, come through. But you tend to think that’s just a character choice. But when you can see a long-running show and someone has made significant personal changes in their lives, you can really see that come across on screen."

"In the voice acting classes, you’re usually in a larger group, and whether you do well or you don’t do well, you’re learning and you’re slowly growing. Whereas, when you’re in a studio environment where big bucks are being spent on the executives who are there on the studio time with all the other voice actors and the time they have them there, you really get put under the gun. You have to sink or swim. You become put into that fight or flight mode. So I wouldn’t say I was forced, but I had to learn the proper style and what the director and the executives were looking for quickly and on the spot. That kind of pressure, I think, helped propel my talent faster than it would have necessarily in a classroom environment."

"I’ve done it from such a young age, and every year I seem to love it more. It’s such a creative atmosphere and the people you work with are a total blast. We never stop laughing."

"I like dark, intense roles, but sometimes it’s nice to step into something a little more wholesome."

"As I get older, I’m finding myself being more cautious about what I get involved in. You want to make sure you have a good time. There’s nothing worse than getting stuck on a set with people you don’t enjoy working with. Life is too short; you have to have fun and enjoy what you do."

"When I fought to protect my land and my home, I was called a savage. When I neither understood nor welcomed his way of life, I was called lazy. When I tried to rule my people, I was stripped of my authority... Oh God! Like the thunderbird of old I shall rise again out of the sea; I shall grab the instruments of the white man's success — his education, his skills — and with these new tools I shall build my race into the proudest segment of your society."

"And today, when you celebrate your hundred years, oh Canada, I am sad for all the Indian people throughout the land. For I have known you when your forests were mine; when they gave me my meat and my clothing. But in the long hundred years since the white man came, I have seen my freedom disappear like the salmon going mysteriously out to sea. The white man's strange customs, which I could not understand, pressed down upon me until I could no longer breathe."

"We paid, we paid, and we paid until we became a beaten race, poverty stricken and conquered. But you have been kind to listen to me, and I know that in your hearts you wish you could help. I wonder if there is much you can do, and yet there is a lot you can do. When you meet my children in your classrooms, respect each one for what he is: a child of our Father in heaven and your brother."

"Can we talk of integration until there is social integration? Unless there is integration in hearts and minds, you only have a physical presence and the walls are as high as the mountain tops."

"I knew my people when they lived the old way. I knew them when there was still a dignity in our lives, and a feeling of worth in our outlook. I knew them when there was unspoken confidence in the home, a certain knowledge of the path we walked upon. But we were living on the dying energy of a dying culture—a culture which was slowly losing its forward thrust. I think it was the suddenness of it all that hurt us so. We did not have time to adjust to the startling upheaval around us. We seemed to have lost what we had without a replacement of it. We did not have time to take this 20th-century progress and eat it little by little and digest it. It was forced feeding from the start, and our stomach turned sick."

"It was 1967...The speech forcefully critiques colonization and calls on Indigenous people to “grab the white man’s instruments of success” to rise again. “Dad and the whole family were very nervous... To stand up and tell the truth in such a profound way, he had no idea how the public would take that.”... After his father finished speaking, there were a few seconds of stunned silence. Then the audience rose to their feet and filled the stadium with about 10 minutes of deafening applause. “He began to cry because he was so touched." He helped bring shameful parts of Canada’s history out of the shadows and inspired young Indigenous leaders... George’s address was so revolutionary, his daughter Amy George recalls, she feared he would be killed for delivering it.,, “Some people did get very angry, too. When we were walking off the field at the stadium, some people were saying ‘You’re nuts!’ and they were throwing bottles and empty cups at us,” she says. There hasn’t been much improvement in how Canada treats First Nations since George’s speech, says his grandson Rueben George."

"I look forward to hearing Chief Dan George's Lament for Confederation read again and again during 2017. Let's revisit this honest and accurate piece of writing penned by an Indigenous leader who all of Canada proudly recognized and embraced. His uncompromising response to the centenary is an indication of the integrity of his character and resolve in who he was."

"Chief Dan George of the Burrard tribe, who was best known for his role in the 1970 movie Little Big Man, died today in his sleep at Lions Gate Hospital. He was 82 years old. Besides his successful acting career, Chief Dan George was also known as an eloquent spokesman for native rights and the environment... He said he was impressed by the progress that Indians had made in his lifetime, noting that he himself, as an old man, had become more forward and bold... Some of our people stand and wait and don't talk for themselves, he said, but this is becoming a thing of the past. The younger Indians consider themselves equal to the white man. ... He said he was proud to see Indians who saw that film walk out of the theater and walk up to a white man and shake him by the hand. That's what they've got to do, you know - believe in themselves and try to fit in."

"My nation was ignored in your history textbooks – they were little more important in the history of Canada than the buffalo that ranged the plains. I was ridiculed in your plays and motion pictures, and when I drank your fire-water, I got drunk – very, very drunk. And I forgot...Oh Canada, how can I celebrate with you this centenary, this hundred years? Shall I thank you for the reserves that are left to me of my beautiful forests? For the canned fish of my rivers? For the loss of my pride and authority, even among my own people? For the lack of my will to fight back? No! I must forget what’s past and gone... Oh God in heaven! Give me back the courage of the olden chiefs. Let me wrestle with my surroundings. Let me again, as in the days of old, dominate my environment. Let me humbly accept this new culture and through it rise up and go on... I shall see our young braves and our chiefs sitting in the houses of law and government, ruling and being ruled by the knowledge and freedoms of our great land. So shall we shatter the barriers of our isolation. So shall the next hundred years be the greatest in the proud history of our tribes and nations."

"I really liked the, uh, the art in the Deadpool comics. You know, I've just kind of always felt a kinship towards him. I mean, I just thought, "I'd like to play that guy some day.""

"I’ve definitely lost all cool. I'm the dad guy now, She’s saying ‘Mama.' What my wife doesn’t realize is [James] calls me ‘Mama,’ too. Seriously. I literally had to sit her down and tell her that penises don’t work that way. She understands -- she gets it. About a month ago, I was sitting in traffic and I was just jamming to 'These Dreams' by Heart, I was killin' it in the car and there was this busload of high school kids that were parked right beside me. I didn't even realize it. I looked over and every one of their jaws were just on the ground laughing their guts out at me. These little high school pricks, you can shove your Nae Nae song up your asses! Twenty years, that’ll be the Nae Nae song, you watch."

"There are rules. Very specific rules. You would diminish stakes in the film if everyone—or even anyone else—was also aware of the fourth wall or any kind of meta aspect. Deadpool is the only character who has that ability to do that. If everyone did that, then you would no longer invest in that character as much. You really want to believe that the villain is a villain. You really want to believe that your costar's character is true as well. Deadpool can undermine that—and does undermine that—because you don’t want the audience to take him as seriously."

"Nobody liked the caesar haircut. It was such an issue this year. There were memos about it. (...) I knew it was doomed when my grandmother, who swore she would never leave Ireland again, came over for the last time, walked in the door and told me I had to change my hairstyle. Not for my own sake, but because I had 'relations' and it's embarrassing for them."

"I'm unfettered by the world, which is a very unique place to be at my age. I'll have to eventually choose what these next few years will be about, but I'm not in a rush. Besides, my personal life is much more important to me than my professional life and my self-worth isn't based on whether or not I act. I love acting, but I'm also looking into the great wide-open at this as-yet unpainted mural that will be my life. Whether or not it involves the movie business I'm not sure. I'm much more interested in becoming a good man than in becoming a good actor."

"Four years ago, I was working steadily but I felt I was disappointing my family, my friends in not living up to what they expected of me. When The Skulls came along I was drawn to it because it's a morality tale encapsulated in a thriller about a guy caught in a Faustian bargain between doing the right thing and the siren song of 'Just let go of your morality and think of all you can have.' Being Irish, I come from a Celtic tradition of storytellers and this was a story I wanted to help tell. I can honestly say I've never worked harder. But to go to bed every night saying to yourself, 'Man, I'm exhausted, but I did a great day's work' it's the best feeling you can have in this planet."

"There'll always be tension between male and female friends - we're animals after all, wired to accept each other on a sexual level at times. Of course we all agree to a variety of social restraints, but it doesn't mean the basic impulses aren't there, and I don't think sex is an unhealthy impulse. It's only when you try to hide it and subvert it that it manifests itself in ugly ways."

"When I was about 15, thinking I was engaging in a light conversation, I asked a woman when she was due. Of course, she wasn't pregnant. I learned the lesson never to ask again. As a leading man you don't ask a woman's age, and you don't care about her natural hair colour or her weight."

"My mother and the mothers of my friends in single parent families were the first inspirational group of women I knew. The majority of fathers that I saw when I was growing up in Vancouver didn't take the responsibility to look after their kids and I was aware that society is geared towards punishing single women."

"I'm really greedy, you see. I want to do everything. I just want to get better. Fame is OK, but if my picture is in a magazine and my performance is shit, then I've gone backwards."

"If I'm Pacey forever, then I deserve to be Pacey forever. The onus is on the actor. I hope I will never begrudge anything about that show. It changed my life and my family's life and I would have to be a really hard-hearted bastard to look back and be angry that I did it."

"I was a troubled teen, as they say. I was drinking - not smoking pot so much as was the easy choice in Vancouver and I was supposed to be a rebel - but I was angry and mixed-up and there was only one parent in my family, so there were those issues that go along with abandonment and all the rest of it."

"I don't consider myself pretty, I was never a pretty boy, I'm not going to be a pretty man and it's not something I truly aspire too. When I think of iconic men I think of that Forties era, of a guy in a good suit and a hat. That's when men were men."

"Whether we're socially indoctrinated to do it or whether it's some other part of the biological imperative, there is emotional attachment that grows specifically around sex. That's how personal relationships are made. If sex were only a simple function, it could be disposed of and not thought of. And you and I both know that's just not true."

"Over 17 years I have played hockey, learned to row, I've been a dog, got blown up... It satisfies the 5 year-old intellectual curiosity, you know? Where I can do anything I want for six months and then move on."

"I don't feel that I need to play characters who are role models for young people. If you are only good, you leave them to explore the bad on their own."

"I hate people saying anything stupid. I don't really suffer fools very well at all. When people are acting like idiots, not that I'm not guilty of doing the odd idiotic thing myself from time to time, but when people say stupid things, it stresses me out. I have a pretty thick skin about people coming up to me and saying things to me when I'm out, I don't really mind that too much. but when people are just loud and annoying, it drives me crazy."

"Right now there are a lot of young actors out there. And in the next couple of years, there's inevitably going to be a thinning of the herd. I think if I improve as I go, I'll survive the slaughter."

"What defies my imagination is that there would be nothing out there that would defy my imagination."

"Pick your myth - we're either Pandora or Prometheus or, frankly, maybe Icarus. We are in a tipping-point era, and we have to either catch up to our abilities, culturally, or some massive global catastrophe will befall us. The planet will live on, but we're going to make it more difficult for us to survive."