Jonathan Majors

“My intention was always to share my experience and my gifts on the largest stage possible.”

“Emotions in the men in my family run deep.”

“Growth is uncomfortable; you have to embrace the discomfort if you want to expand.”

“Because when you're in drama school, you're playing multiple characters at once. You know, in the morning you're doing a Chekhov play, and then you're doing a Shakespeare workshop midday.”

“I'm a military brat; my mother's a pastor. There's been a lot of order in my life that I don't have control over, that I just dedicate myself to.”

“I was accepted to North Carolina School of the Arts with stitches in my mouth.”

“You know, I didn't grow up in a cultured household. We were all highly intelligent, but we were common, simple people. We weren't activists, none of that.”

“I have a very high frequency of anger, and a very high frequency of sadness.”

“When you allow yourself to really think about the future and the legacy you're leaving, you become gentler.”

“I look for what responsibility the character has in telling the story. If you remove the role from the story, can you still tell the story properly? And if the answer is no, then I'm interested.”

“In war, the first thing that goes, when you try to take over culture, is the statues. I think we all can recall statues with their heads cut off in museums.”

“The interesting thing about an absent father is, for a child, you don't know he's absent. You just think he's... tardy.”

“And if you think this young boy, from Dallas, Texas, is adding to the canon of theater arts, of performing arts, of cinema, well I'm humbled and I'm very excited.”

“I spent some time in juvenile detention, and as far as owning space, I may have owned too much space as a young boy, and it got me in trouble. But through that, I found some unity. I found acting, and that's become a place to exercise that.”

“So I feel now very much like a guardian. I'm standing in front of art. I'm standing in front of cinema. I'm standing in front of Black culture. I'm standing in front of the history of America, and I'm protecting it by making art, by protecting our art, and by promoting our art.”

“I'm not a pastor. I'm not a man of the cloth, but I have my own calling.”

“My first kiss was fourth grade, girl named Krista West. We're walking out to the black top, and I throw my arm around her. I kiss her on the cheek.”

“I have nine years of scholastic actor training, and what I've learned is that training does not an actor make. You have to have an artful way of looking at things. You have to have a certain point of view. And you get that point of view through experience.”

“The first thing I do when I start a role is I look to see where we're similar. What do you get for nothing, you know?”

“If you've been in drama school for eight years, you've got teachers in your head all the time.”