My mom, who is a very strong Christian woman, will often ask me how some of the characters I play glorify God. Her meaning is that she feels as if every character should be a good Christian character, which is not necessarily my interpretation.
— Sterling K. Brown
Sarah Paulson doesn't lie. Like, in life. But she doesn't lie onscreen, and you can't take your eyes off somebody who always tells the truth. She's the most honest person I've ever met.
The humanity that is given to other people isn't given to us. There is an expendability that comes along with being African American.
I go to grad school at NYU, and I learn all these things about speech and voice and games. It's like camp for an actor, and I got a chance to immerse myself 12 to 14 hours a day in what I love.
You can take your play seriously as long as you seriously play.
M. Night Shyamalan can draw quite a few people to quite a few things, and having the opportunity to work with him is very cool.
A couple of my favorite actors are Don Cheadle, Jeffrey Wright, and, may he rest in peace, Philip Seymour Hoffman. I've had an opportunity to see all of them onscreen and onstage.
If you haven't done shows that are on everyone's radar, then you're something out of nowhere.
Different roles call for different aspects or different faces of Sterling to emerge.
As a father of two black sons now, you ask yourself, 'What do I have to do to assure the safety of these boys?' It can be daunting.
I'm a little kid from St. Louis, Missouri, on the inside.
Don't become too attached to your own myopia. Just because you've found a way to do things doesn't mean it's the way to do things. There are so many different ways in which to navigate this so-called life. Be open to experiencing more than one.
The first time I went on a serious run was when I was 21 years old at Stanford University. From 21 to 30, I continued the tradition and ran 10 miles every year on my birthday.
Running gives me the confidence to be at my peak throughout the rest of my day.
I never assume people are going to recognize me.
I lived in St. Louis, Missouri, and now my kids are growing up in Los Angeles, so that's culturally very different.
I was at Stanford University up in the West Coast Bay Area, so the biggest song of my freshman year was 'I Got 5 on It' by Luniz, and the 'I Got 5 on It' remix was the joint that everybody was jamming constantly. And then it was also at that particular time that I became a fan of the Wu-Tang Clan.
I do not believe that any particular religion has any monopoly on salvation.
Understand what you want, and want it as badly as you can. Make the stakes for yourself as life-or-death as you can.
Any great art is meant to illuminate the human condition.
I discovered that I love being on stage in high school.
The most fundamental important thing for me as an actor is maintaining a sense of play. It's so important.
After six months of playing Chris Darden, it's very hard for me to separate my views from his.
In my mind, I'm still this kid from St. Louis, Missouri, that nobody really knows.
Always have an attitude of gratitude.
Every character I play is me.
The prism through which you experience life is so unique. There is no objective experience.
Being in a Marvel film is the pinnacle of secrecy training.
The first trip I can remember would have to be to Marianna, Arkansas. My mother's parents are from there, and we'd go every year to visit the church where they were buried. We'd attend church service that day, put flowers around their tombstones, and visit with family and friends that still lived there.
I've had people come stand in front of the treadmill and wait for me to acknowledge their presence so they can speak.
I think what Hollywood is learning at large is that there is profitability in stories that are culturally specific and that you can only address the universal through the specific.
I catch myself every once in a while doing that weird thing that I see famous people do, where they have sunglasses and hats on and grow out beards thinking that they're fooling people. Dude, you're not fooling anyone: you look just like you.
I went to Target once and picked up three seasons of '24' - what I call the Jack Bauer power hour - and watched 72 episodes in ten days.
I have tremendous respect for Christopher Darden, and I recognize him as an individual of integrity, who did his job to the best of his ability, and I want to tell him thank you. Thank you for enduring hatred from his own community, for being ostracized and called an Uncle Tom and a sellout.
Muhammad Ali was the greatest of all time. But what made him even greater was what he did outside the ring.
I'm a spiritual person. I do believe in a higher power. I believe God placed me on this planet to be a beneficial presence.
I go to Stanford, and I'm an economics major, not thinking I'm going to do anything with acting. A professor came to the dorm where I lived looking for people to audition for an August Wilson play, 'Joe Turner's Come And Gone.' I gave it a shot, got one of the lead roles in the play.
Every time I'd do a play, my grades would get better because I was doing something that fed my soul. It took me a couple of years to recognize that the hobby was actually the calling.
Life has to be everything. It can't be all sad. It can't be all peaches and cream. Because the lows have you appreciate the highs. And the highs give you perspective on the lows. If it's not everything, it becomes flat or mundane.
With any sort of entertainment, you hope people are entertained.
On Twitter, there'll be fans of 'Army Wives' and people who say, 'I've been following you since 'Supernatural,' I loved you on 'Person of Interest,'' and it's really cool to get that love. To them, I'm not just an overnight success.
I didn't grow up feeling very handsome.
What was so lovely about 'O.J.' and 'This Is Us' to a certain extent is that I got a chance to surprise people.
At the highest level of your craft, you don't have to play games or make people feel small; you can just embrace.
I'm obsessed with how people talk! Accents, dialects... So whenever I go someplace where an accent is extremely distinct - Minneapolis, New Orleans, Jamaica, Vancouver - I always find myself trying to pick up the subtleties of their patterns.
My family did a lot of road trips across these continental United States when I was a kid. Twenty or so of us would caravan in four or five vehicles and hit every corner of the connected 48.
In the gym, people's enthusiasm tends to get the best of them. They realize this is their opportunity to say hello or that they love my work... It doesn't matter how profusely you're sweating.
I've been able to pay the bills. I've been able to pay off my student loans. I was a homeowner before anything happened in the larger public eye.
I have gay people in my family who weren't able to openly discuss homosexuality, and I feel like that's shifted, especially here on the coast.
When I got into Stanford in high school, I had some friends from school who told me that I just got in because I was black and whatnot.
