“I think many villains have the burden of not being very human.”
― Joe Morton
“What’s lovely about ‘Eureka’ is that it’s a sci-fi show, but it’s not monsters from outer space; it’s not craziness from outer space. It’s just about this community of people and what they do. These geniuses have sometimes done wonderful things and sometimes created global warming. It has this wonderful left-of-center sense of humor.”
― Joe Morton
“I actually went to the university as a psychology major, and at orientation, they took us around the campus and took us to the theater for a skit. At the end of the skit, I literally could not get up out of my seat.”
― Joe Morton
“I think people believe that I give an aura of someone who has both feet on the ground.”
― Joe Morton
“There are lots of stories about my culture that I think bring a whole other perspective to who we are and where we have been and how we got here that I think need to be done.”
― Joe Morton
“’Paycheck,’ I thought, was a really, really good idea. I never got an opportunity, unfortunately, to read the novel, but I loved the idea of how to deal with intellectual properties. I just don’t know that we necessarily got to the heart of that particular idea. I think it became more of a chase movie than anything else.”
― Joe Morton
“We live in a world where racism hasn’t changed at all. It’s that old thing of, you know, the more things change, the more things remain the same.”
― Joe Morton
“Accolades are there to congratulate you but also to make you understand that it’s not over. You now have to continue trying to improve the craft and keep going. It’s not something to rest on.”
― Joe Morton
“One of the beauties of working in Shondaland is that they make an effort to get to know who you are, so they’re not giving you something that’s going to be so far out of your comfort zone.”
― Joe Morton
“My tendency is to be quiet and to stay focused and in character. Not the entire time, but certainly to stay focused while I’m on set.”
― Joe Morton
“One, I had never worked with John Woo before and I wanted to see what that was like, and two, Ben Affleck is a friend, so it would be fun to work with him again.”
― Joe Morton
“I think the thing is with a movie that has this much science fiction in it; you need characters who are more science fact, if you know what I mean, than they are human.”
― Joe Morton
“I think it talks about the fact that there are black people in the world who have tremendous amount of talents and have no channel through which they can those talents.”
― Joe Morton
“I think it talks about that there needs to be some proactive attack against drugs infiltrating our culture.”
― Joe Morton
“Yes, I would love to play one of the leads in one these movies and have all those challenges and deal with all those complications, but the business being what it is, there is a slot for me in these kinds of films, so I enjoy them, and I enjoy the people that I work with.”
― Joe Morton
“I would love to play the villain, but again, it’s sort of what happens in this industry.”
― Joe Morton
“When I started off many years ago, I made a determination that there were certain roles I didn’t want to play.”
― Joe Morton
“Basically, the actor’s job is to pay attention to the script.”
― Joe Morton
“With my background, I came out of the theater.”
― Joe Morton
“I came into the industry at a time when there weren’t a lot of choices to what you could do.”
― Joe Morton
“I love doing movies but I loved doing theatre just as much.”
― Joe Morton
“James Cameron has always been way ahead of the curve in terms of the use of technology in his movies.”
― Joe Morton
“Film and television is just a different technique in terms of how to approach the camera but basically the job is the same; but what you learn as a craft in theater, you can then learn to translate that into any mediums.”
― Joe Morton
“Unfortunately, most actors want to play off their own personal mystique and good looks and whatever, but that will only carry you but so far.”
― Joe Morton
“If there’s no craft there, then once the looks go, there goes your career.”
― Joe Morton
“If you have the skill, then you can move as you age.”
― Joe Morton
“Even if you have something that you can contribute to society, very often society doesn’t view you that way. Because when you are The Other, the first response by the mainstream, if you will, is to ostracize.”
― Joe Morton
“Everywhere I go, someone stops me and says, ‘Oh, you’re that guy from ‘Terminator 2.” So, it’s something that has, you know, been around me since the movie came out.”
― Joe Morton
“If you live a good life, that seems to be what really matters. If there is something afterwards, terrific. If not, you haven’t lost anything.”
― Joe Morton
“I was maybe one of two black kids in the drama department. It was, ‘Well, you can’t play this role because that guy has a white girlfriend or a white cousin or whatever.’”
― Joe Morton
“I guess on one hand I believe it doesn’t matter if there is life after death.”
― Joe Morton
“Hollywood, it seems, recognizes black film and black filmmakers, but like a distant lover, never close enough or long enough to forge a meaningful relationship.”
― Joe Morton
“Hollywood has successfully produced many films framed by anti-racist or pro-integrationist story lines. I’m going to guess that since ‘Gone With The Wind,’ Hollywood realized films about racism and segregation pull at the heartstrings of everyone and hopefully serve to purge a sense of guilt.”
― Joe Morton
“Is it racist to prefer country music over the blues? Or is it simply a classic case of tribal antipathy toward the unfamiliar, in favor of gravitating to what you know?”
― Joe Morton
“’Black film,’ unless it’s lucky enough or creative enough, or timely enough to build a life of its own, hangs subjacent to ‘white film’ on Hollywood’s financial score board… aided and abetted by the supposition that so-called black film has no foreign market.”
― Joe Morton
“’12 Years A Slave’ is a film that is beautifully shot, wonderfully acted, and told in a compelling manner. However, there are some questions, in my opinion, as to its importance. Paramount among those questions is, What does this scenario illustrate that we didn’t know or haven’t seen before? And why does such a film garner such popularity?”
― Joe Morton
“Perhaps, despite my objections, the success of films like: ‘The Help,’ ‘Django,’ ‘The Butler,’ or ’12 Years a Slave,’ will further persuade Hollywood to widen its view and edit its erroneous perception of what a commercial black film can look like.”
― Joe Morton
“You make up your mind what part you want to read for and why. It’s kept me focused – on what’s important, what I want, and what I don’t.”
― Joe Morton
“By the time I graduated, I was the drum major, the highest-ranking officer, and third in my class.”
― Joe Morton
“I was different. I got beat up every day.”
― Joe Morton
“It’s a very different thing when you’re creating the world as opposed to when you’re just part of the world. I love the detail of it, the problem-solving of it, and I love working with actors.”
― Joe Morton
“It’s important to me to play men who use their brains, not just brawn.”
― Joe Morton
“In most science-fiction pictures, the black guy is either an engineer or a radio operator, and he is the first guy killed – gone from the movie.”
― Joe Morton
“I want to put something on the screen that audiences have never seen black actors do before, roles that will widen views of who African-Americans are.”
― Joe Morton
“When I was growing up, all these superheroes were white. On some level, you put that out of your mind… but as you get older, you realize it’s a very one-sided affair. So I’m very glad to see that these movies are becoming more diversified.”
― Joe Morton
“Acting-wise, it’s always exciting to come back for a third season of any TV show that you’re working on.”
― Joe Morton
“In the 1980s, there was no category to stick me in. ‘He sounds too smart’ is what I was hearing. I realized that I had to become a member of the school of what I call ‘ugly acting.’ Which meant I wanted to do what Dustin Hoffman did very successfully: to play character roles, but lead character roles.”
― Joe Morton
“Actors are very often people who are placed in a position where they think they have to be grateful for the job and have no control over what they play and how they play it. I was not taught that way. I completely disagree with that. I think that you have more control than you think.”
― Joe Morton
“I think that’s what good writing is all about. You go into a genre to talk about other things. Tolkein created a whole world to talk about the world he lived in.”
― Joe Morton
“I always feel like I’m running an hour and a half late.”
― Joe Morton
“Race prejudice has nothing to do with color. It has to do with being the stranger.”
― Joe Morton
“If you want someone who is sort of still, has a bit of an edge, is older, you get Morgan Freeman. If you want someone who can carry a gun and still play a father, you get Danny Glover. My category is ‘that guy who happens to be black.’”
― Joe Morton
“When was the last time you saw a straight black love story without any guns?”
― Joe Morton
“I entered Hofstra University as a psychology major.”
― Joe Morton
“Everyone does what they believe they need to do in order to survive in this business, ‘survive’ being the operative word.”
― Joe Morton
“When I first came into New York City, what I did was, I didn’t have very much money, and I couldn’t afford pictures or a resume, so what I used to do is I would tear off the back of a matchbook, and I’d write my name and telephone number on the back of the matchbook.”
― Joe Morton
“You want to be challenged, so you feel like you want to get up and wrestle with the character or enjoy the character – especially with a TV show, because you know you could be doing it for a long time, so you want to make sure it’s something you really enjoy.”
― Joe Morton
“I think, very often, we’re addicted to procedurals, those good guy/bad guy shows, and the ‘problem’ with procedurals is they all follow the same formula: The bad guy does his thing, the good guy goes after him, and in most cases, the good guy figures out who did it and catches him.”
― Joe Morton
“When we were bringing ‘Raisin’ onto Broadway, our first stop was at Arena in D.C. Several things struck me about being in D.C.: One was the enormous poverty around the capital at that time – it was 1973, ’74 – and I was stunned by people literally living in poverty, with holes in their houses and other things.”
― Joe Morton
“It’s funny: We have so many shows and so many channels and so many things to occupy people as entertainment, especially with a show like ‘Scandal,’ which is clearly a hit, with a lot of heat around it – but every once in a while, people will say, ‘What are you doing?’ and I’ll say ‘Scandal,’ and they’ll have no idea what I’m talking about.”
― Joe Morton
“I think that, unfortunately, it appears that Donald Trump is trampling all over the Constitution.”
― Joe Morton
“With Trump, because of the kind of seemingly violent way that he talks about things and because he’s on Twitter almost every single morning, I think it brings down the respect that we have for the White House and for the Oval Office in particular, so the expectation is anything can happen, and that becomes the norm, which is unfortunate.”
― Joe Morton
“I’ve never liked much of reality television, mostly because it involves humiliation.”
― Joe Morton
“I make it a habit of never trying to judge what an audience might think, only because all points of view are too close, because we’re doing it every day, I think that the actor’s point of view is sometimes too close to what the material actually is.”
― Joe Morton
“What you find with really good directors is that they kind of leave you alone. They’ve hired you because they know the kind of work you do and the sense of how you’d approach it. So usually, they’ll just stand back and maybe give you a nudge once in a while in terms of something specific they might want in a particular scene.”
― Joe Morton
“I suppose I prefer kind of epic dramas like, oh, I don’t know… ‘Lawrence Of Arabia’ or ‘Apocalypse Now’; those are the movies that I have a tendency to be most fond of.”
― Joe Morton
“Proof’ is going to be, in many ways, a mystery. It’s not a procedural in any way. It’s not a medical drama. It really is about trying to investigate whether or not there’s life after death.”
― Joe Morton
“I don’t live on the West Coast, so when I come out to work, I rent a house.”
― Joe Morton
“I love doing theater. Despite the fact that out of theater, film, and TV, theater is the hardest thing to do. It’s the least paid, and we all have these bills that we have to pay.”
― Joe Morton
“I know who Dick Gregory is; I knew what his accomplishments are. I certainly knew him as a comedian and an activist.”
― Joe Morton
“I didn’t play basketball because I’d learned how to ice skate.”
― Joe Morton
“I don’t think you can play a villain with a negative point of view.”
― Joe Morton
“I think every villain basically thinks that he or she is doing something to make his world, or the world in general, a better place.”
― Joe Morton
“’Breaking Bad’ – when I started watching that show, I thought it was terrific. I love the way it was shot. I love the writing. I love the arc of Bryan Cranston’s character. I just thought that was just really, really a wonderful, wonderful show.”
― Joe Morton
“In the case of Papa Pope, certainly he’s making his daughter’s world and the world of the republic a much better place.”
― Joe Morton
“My father was in the military; he was a captain. His service was to quote-unquote integrate the Armed Forces overseas.”
― Joe Morton
“For all of the diversity in ‘Scandal,’ no one else would be sitting in a room wearing a T-shirt and chains and call a Southern white Republican president a ‘boy.’ And it’s those kinds of things that Rowan has the freedom to say that nobody else could say within the confines of the show.”
― Joe Morton
“I don’t watch a lot of television, which sounds strange for someone who works in TV.”
― Joe Morton
“I think it might be interesting to give an Emmy to an outstanding background performance in either a comedy or drama series.”
― Joe Morton
“Dick Gregory used every syllable, every metaphor, every joke, every march, every incarceration, every hour of his life, to embarrass this country into providing a more perfect, perfect union.”
― Joe Morton
“Dick Gregory will be greatly missed. Humbly, and in his stead, ‘Turn Me Loose’ carries on to be his voice and his inspiration for all who wish to laugh at the absurdity of racism and be enlightened by his spirit of justice.”
― Joe Morton
“We’ve all grown up with ‘Ozzie and Harriet,’ ‘Father Knows Best,’ ‘Eight Is Enough.’ White families have always represented the universal family.”
― Joe Morton
“My whole career has been a landmark. So I don’t think about the pressure too much. I just go out and do, because I believe in it.”
― Joe Morton
“I’ve played good guys for most of my career, and when I came out to California, I thought, ‘I really would like to find some wonderfully intelligent bad guy to play.’”
― Joe Morton
“I think the responsibility that any actor has is to bring some truth to the work.”
― Joe Morton
“When I started, black people were either victims or they were the perpetrators; they were the boogie men who jumped out of the bushes and did terrible things to you.”
― Joe Morton
“Most of my career I purposely spent doing good guys.”
― Joe Morton
“If you’ve been on top of the food chain in the Armed Forces, that’s who you are. You’re used to dealing with your life in a particular way.”
― Joe Morton
“When you give your children certain life lessons, and they come and ask you for additional advice, you say to yourself, ‘I’ve done my job,’ and you’ll continue to do your job.”
― Joe Morton
“To work for Shonda Rhimes is heaven. It’s been amazing.”
― Joe Morton
“I think it’s true for all of us, if you find yourself doing really well at something, then the pressure is on you to try to improve.”
― Joe Morton
“’Turn Me Loose’ was Off-Broadway, and now we are making a concerted effort to figure out how to get it to on Broadway.”
― Joe Morton
“My father was in the service. His job was to integrate the Armed Forces overseas. So that meant we showed up at military bases in Okinawa or Germany, racially unannounced. That made me, in that particular society if you will, the outsider.”
― Joe Morton
“I think the greatest lesson that power has to teach us is, once you’ve had it, once you are a part of it, you’re never free.”
― Joe Morton
“There’s nothing better than an educated actor – not only educated in his craft but educated in the world.”
― Joe Morton
“The more you know about the world, the more resources you have in terms of things that can inform your character or the circumstances that surround your character.”
― Joe Morton
“If you can keep a character fresh and alive for, let’s say, six months, working eight nights a week, then you can do anything. You have honed your technique and your skills to such a degree by that point that you are ready to take on all kinds of challenges.”
― Joe Morton
“The argument for ’12 Years a Slave’ was that – yes, it’s a beautiful film. Beautifully shot, beautifully acted. It’s a real story, and these stories should be told. The problem is, if they’re the only stories being told, then it makes Americans of African descent – it puts them into that victim category. And that was my problem with the movie.”
― Joe Morton
“In my opinion, it would be a lot better for the culture – meaning the culture of America – if there was more diversity in terms of storyline. In terms of the kind of content that you see about Americans of African descent on the screen.”
― Joe Morton
“When I first saw Dick Gregory on television, growing up in Queens, it was startling and amazing, because nobody else was doing what he was doing.”
― Joe Morton
“I think theater is the strongest place to find what’s missing in entertainment. Unfortunately, it pays the least.”
― Joe Morton
“I don’t know of any actor in any television show that I have ever seen who’s given monologue after monologue in a television series.”
― Joe Morton
“I started off at Hofstra University in Hempstead, Long Island, and started doing theater in Manhattan in 1969.”
― Joe Morton
“Television has been really good to me in terms of the roles I’ve been able to get on TV as opposed to the roles I’ve gotten in film and in theater.”
― Joe Morton
“Part of the decision I made was to move very fluidly from one medium to the other, and so it has stayed as part of who I am. I don’t know if I have a preference.”
― Joe Morton
“Because of ‘Terminator 2,’ you get not pigeonholed but circled as one of those guys who can understand their way through a movie like that and hold it down.”
― Joe Morton
“Republicans in the South… are trying to find ways, not so much to block black and brown people from voting, but to block black and brown people from getting people they want elected, which is a far more subtle thing to do.”
― Joe Morton
“When it comes to certain portions of our history, we’ve just forgotten it all.”
― Joe Morton
“If we’re still talking about the same thing 40 or 50 years later, then that means we’re not doing anything about it.”
― Joe Morton
“With any villain, you have to see things from their point of view and understand that they think what they’re doing will make the world a better place.”
― Joe Morton
“It’s important to know, whether you’re pro or anti the current president and what he’s doing, that he’s doing what he thinks is for the betterment of the country because his interest is to make this country a better place.”
― Joe Morton
“Being back on stage in New York, off-Broadway – I mean, that’s an actor’s dream.”
― Joe Morton
“I have lots of hopes for black actors in general, whether they be on TV or on stage or in movies, and that is that we move beyond the tokenism of what it means to be black in a particular set of circumstances.”
― Joe Morton
“You don’t have the opportunity to win an Emmy unless you’re given the opportunity to play certain kinds of roles.”
― Joe Morton
“Without mentioning any names, there was a film that was being done, and I ran into the producer on the plane. It was a book that I really, really loved, and I said, ‘I’d love to be a part of this.’ And they made it clear that that was not going to be possible – for no particular reason other than that there was just no part for a black person.”
― Joe Morton
“The most frightening thing about playing Dick Gregory is I’ve never done stand-up before, and I had to learn how to be a stand-up comedian, which was a bit of a challenge.”
― Joe Morton
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