Daniel Kaluuya
I listened to this book, 'The Beauty Myth,' about how beauty standards are messing with women in Western society, and I was like, 'I don't know this.' I have no idea, and I don't pretend to, but now I'm more aware of it because I've engaged on that frequency.
I am definitely not a household face, and I don't expect to be one.
I don't think you become a name with just one job.
Being young, working class, and black, everything you do is policed. If someone hits you and you hit back, you are aggressive. If you cry, you are weak. You are kind of always pretending to be something.
I just want to tell black stories.
Even people who say that black people are minorities, there are a billion black people in the world. A billion white people. What part of that is a minority? If you separate yourself, then maybe. But I see black people as one man. When I see people beaten on the streets of America, that hurts me. I feel that.
'Skins' was like our uni. I'm tight with everyone from 'Skins' because we had that special experience together.
My experience growing up in London and growing up in a working class background is that when people are down and out, that's when they're probably the funniest. They have to be. That's what they do to cope, to find joy, 'cause they don't feel the joy inside. Or they use humor to keep people out.
'A Prophet' is one of my favorite films of all time.
I wrote my first play when I was nine. It was performed at Hampstead Theatre.
I hope people listen to black people more. You'd be surprised how little people listen to black people when it comes to racial issues. It's weird.
'Sucker Punch' was so demanding, it scared me a bit.
I love comedy. I don't think there's enough comedy on stage.
'The Fades' is its own world. If you try and link it to some religion, you have people going, 'Oh, that's not right,' with their Bible open. Let's just chuck some imagination at it.
Really, I have no idea how I'm perceived in the industry.
There's a lot of black men running around with crazy trauma scars, and they should be going to therapy. They should be sitting down and talking to people. But they can't. If you've got the armor of being a man, and the armor of being a black man, that hyper-masculine thing can make those scars deeper.
I find it hard to watch a lot of the kind of things I'm doing before doing it. I don't think it's helpful for me. It makes me too aware.
What you want to do is make people talk, start a conversation.
Racism isn't just in America... Alienation is felt worldwide in different capacities.
I think diverse stories are just stories. I don't think 'diverse' is an add-on package. Things that are not diverse are weird because that's not accurate.
A lot of black men have problems being emotionally vulnerable because of the boundaries and parameters that have been put onto them by society.Collection: Men
Improv is like writing. It's actually a different discipline to acting. It helps acting greatly, but it's completely different. It's the same side of your brain when you write as when you improv.Collection: Writing
My experience growing up in London and growing up in a working class background, is that when people are down and out, that's when they're probably the funniest. They have to be. That's what they do to cope, to find joy, cause they don't feel the joy inside. Or they use humor to keep people out.Collection: Growing Up
A lot of people have an opinion on scripts, but they aren't equipped to diagnose what the problems are. You realize that scriptwriting is such a specialist subject, but because it's so common, everyone thinks that they can talk about that. I think it's something that writers only know, that they can see.Collection: Thinking
I don't think writing stops until the film is out. In the edit, it's another draft. [The script] is the food for set, and then the set is food for the edit, and the edit is food for the screen. It's constant, and this is just the first stage of it.Collection: Writing