“While I appreciate horror movies, I’d love the opportunity to do something transformative, especially because people see me as contemporary. There’s a lot to explore in my career that could take me back to another time. A period piece would be an incredible game of dress-up, too.”
― Ari Graynor
“I would love to be doing more voice-over work. It’s such a fun and free playground to take risks, play around, and get sort of ridiculous.”
― Ari Graynor
“I did babysit a little bit when I was young. I prefer babysitting for babies. I always loved babies. I was not as great with kids that wanted to be entertained and that wanted to talk.”
― Ari Graynor
“I would love to be in ‘Downton Abbey.’ That’s the thing I thing many people would have a good laugh with me saying anything like that. I feel like that’s the next phase of my career. To reprove to everyone that I can do things besides the crazy characters.”
― Ari Graynor
“Part of doing good work is caring deeply about it, believing in what you’re doing, and getting incredibly attached to the characters that you’re playing, the stories you’re telling, and the people you’re working with.”
― Ari Graynor
“I’m a little quirky, a little offbeat, and I’m certainly not a classic beauty.”
― Ari Graynor
“I was the kind of kid that always loved babies. I was, you know, four years old, and I would have my baby doll that I would bring with me everywhere and fake breastfeed on the beach and diaper.”
― Ari Graynor
“There’s pressure to come up with something genius every time. I feel like I keep letting myself down with my Twitter posts. I have to start keeping a journal of rough drafts of prophetic ideas about the world.”
― Ari Graynor
“The language can be different, but the emotional lives are the same no matter whether you’re doing Shakespeare or Stoppard or something else… The emotional life is all the same.”
― Ari Graynor
“I’ve had curly hair for years, and I never wore it curly. I didn’t know what to do with it.”
― Ari Graynor
“People remember the last thing you did.”
― Ari Graynor
“The only thing that I’m not willing to do is really stupid, horribly written sitcoms. It can be tempting during pilot season time, but I realized this a while ago when I almost signed my life away to a stupid pilot.”
― Ari Graynor
“For all creative people, that’s sort of everyone’s journey. You feel something inside, and it takes a while to figure out what that looks like and what your voice is.”
― Ari Graynor
“I went through a little hippy dippy program at Brandeis and was bat mizvahed by the rabbi who married my parents. We celebrated the High Holidays and had the traditional Rosh Hashanah dinner.”
― Ari Graynor
“There’s something innately funny and warm about being Jewish. I think it’s something to be embraced and respected.”
― Ari Graynor
“I’m not nearly as brave and confident in some of the ways that I think stand-ups are.”
― Ari Graynor
“I didn’t want to study theater or go to school in the city. I wanted the all-American ‘Here’s your quad’ college experience.”
― Ari Graynor
“All we can do in life is push through the things that make us afraid and try to be better.”
― Ari Graynor
“I played a lot of dress-up in my room. I really liked being alone. I had a lot of friends, but I had an only-child, live-in-my-head personality.”
― Ari Graynor
“I was more of the kind of babysitter that liked holding the baby, sort of playing Mom, and then putting the baby to bed and watching TV while eating everything in their kitchen.”
― Ari Graynor
“I think the world of comedy is a relatively small community, and especially for women in comedy, there just aren’t that many people involved.”
― Ari Graynor
“Working with David Gordon Green, and Jonah Hill, and Michael Cera, and Drew Barrymore, and all of those people – those are the best people in comedy to work with. Anna Faris. You know, that’s my goal, to keep learning and to just keep working with the best people I can. And yeah, we do all hang out, and we all kind of know each other.”
― Ari Graynor
“Twitter’s a lot of work! That’s the first thing I would say. There’s so much pressure to be funny.”
― Ari Graynor
“I was a precocious only child, and then I went through a fat, awkward stage for several years, so I learned to fall back on my humor and personality when I was growing up. It’s how you survive, so I think it was more of a natural progression for me, developing into comedy.”
― Ari Graynor
“Regardless of what kind of film, the number one rule of comedy is to never take yourself too seriously and then the next rule is you can’t have any self-consciousness, otherwise it kills the laugh, and that will never change.”
― Ari Graynor
“The Bowery Hotel is always a great place to meet people for drinks. It’s so cozy in there, especially in the late fall and winter.”
― Ari Graynor
“Numb3rs’ was a wonderful gift because I had not worked in six months. It was so fun to be on that set doing these crazy things.”
― Ari Graynor
“You can’t please everybody. All you can do is please yourself.”
― Ari Graynor
“My mom was in the chorus of ‘Hello Dolly’ and ‘The Worldly Players’; my dad would build the set.”
― Ari Graynor
“You look at Richard Pryor and Robert Klein and George Carlin and Richard Lewis – those guys were so smart, they were the thinking-man stand-ups.”
― Ari Graynor
“It took me a solid four or five years to feel really comfortable in front of the camera.”
― Ari Graynor
“I had been doing theater since I was a kid, so the stage really felt like home to me. It felt like the place where I trust myself the most in the world and felt the most confident.”
― Ari Graynor
“When you’re having a good time working on something, and you all like each other, it shows in ways that you don’t even realize.”
― Ari Graynor
“Comedy is funny when it comes from truth, and that’s always the rule of them. It’s about how far you can push that boundary.”
― Ari Graynor
“For years, I said I didn’t want to do television. It was just a hard ‘no.’ I didn’t want to read anything. It didn’t matter what it was – it was just ‘no.’”
― Ari Graynor
“I started acting because it was essentially the way I needed to survive and equalize my inner life.”
― Ari Graynor
“No one’s up in arms about these PG-13 movies where it’s literally about the end of the world.”
― Ari Graynor
“Not one person has ever sent me a drink because I was Caroline in ‘Nick and Norah.’ People reference it; people say really nice things about it, but I was sure I would be getting more free drinks.”
― Ari Graynor
“I’m an only child, and in college, I was given a single, and then I lived with people for, like, two years but were my best friends, and we had a really fun time. And then I lived alone or with a boyfriend. I’ve never really had a bad roommate situation.”
― Ari Graynor
“Usually, when I’m at a festival with a movie that I’m in, I’m in and out in 24 hours.”
― Ari Graynor
“I’ve done a bunch of Broadway, so I’m a theater nerd when I come to New York.”
― Ari Graynor
“I feel like I’m sort of afraid to study too much because I feel like I work as I go, but I want to study the classics and also the technical aspects of things. I’m always looking to understand more.”
― Ari Graynor
“I was made fun of for being fat from fourth or fifth grade to eighth grade. That was pretty rough.”
― Ari Graynor
“I was the girl who got out of my athletic requirement by managing the boys’ sports teams. Which is pretty ingenious, because when I was a sophomore, I got a prom date out of it. That was really strong planning on my part.”
― Ari Graynor
“Sitting around with Jim Carrey, coming up with bits, is, like, beyond a dream come true.”
― Ari Graynor
“You can only really hear the beat of your own drum if you give yourself the space to sit in it.”
― Ari Graynor
“In high school, everyone told me I had a great personality and sense of humor, but I wanted to be the girl who boys liked because she was pretty on top of being funny. I was boy crazy.”
― Ari Graynor
“I prefer situational or character-based humor to gross-out gags and comedic set pieces.”
― Ari Graynor
“I want the power that comes from expressing myself creatively and putting something back into the world. Being someone’s muse would be flattering, but it could get old fast.”
― Ari Graynor
“I started acting when I was seven, so I’ve read my share.”
― Ari Graynor
“When you look at all of the male characters on television and in film, it’s not like every one of them are the people doing the right thing that you can point to as your own moral compass. We need to have all kinds of characters represented.”
― Ari Graynor
“A lot of entertainment, and especially in a half-hour format, can be all jokes, all the time. And some of those jokes can be really, really funny, but what I respond to, as a viewers, is identification or caring about the characters.”
― Ari Graynor
“There’s a certain truism that you can’t be self-conscious in comedy.”
― Ari Graynor
“I think most people have experienced that at some point: being on one end or the other of a super-unbalanced relationship.”
― Ari Graynor
“It is frustrating that people have a hard time telling other female stories besides, ‘Is she going to get the guy?’”
― Ari Graynor
“It shouldn’t be an issue that we have a black president. Gay marriage shouldn’t be an issue. And women being funny shouldn’t be an issue.”
― Ari Graynor
“I think it’s important to have goals and to have dreams, but you also have to live in the moment of what the reality is.”
― Ari Graynor
“I love being onstage. As I’ve gotten older, it terrifies me more and more, which is interesting.”
― Ari Graynor
“Onstage was where I felt the most confident and in control and free, and as I’ve gotten older, it’s gotten more and more daunting. And I think that’s also part of my desire to keep confronting that and pushing through to find that childlike or youthful ignorance against fear and keep at it.”
― Ari Graynor
“I was a highly sensitive kid, sort of an old soul, and I felt like a lot of people in my peer group didn’t fully understand me, or I couldn’t fully be myself. I just wasn’t engaged in a way that was fulfilling me.”
― Ari Graynor
“The worst thing you can have as an actor is too big an ego. It just kills creativity.”
― Ari Graynor
“I’ve already put my parents through the wringer with a number of my jobs!”
― Ari Graynor
“On stage, you have nothing to hide behind. It allows the work to live in a more organic place. It’s almost like a meditation. You have to go on that stage and be as present as possible.”
― Ari Graynor
“It’s an incredible thing when you are creating something in a moment with the other people on stage and with an audience, and you are all experiencing it together as it exists in that one night. It’s a magical feeling.”
― Ari Graynor
“I’ve started to get more stage fright the older I get.”
― Ari Graynor
“I think a reason why actors get reputations for being crazy and neurotic is because your life task is constantly in flux.”
― Ari Graynor
“My deepest fear about doing TV, especially about doing a network comedy, was what if it felt too surface-y? What if it felt too jokey?”
― Ari Graynor
“As a kid, I watched a lot of TV.”
― Ari Graynor
“When I was kid, I couldn’t wait to take the world by storm, to be a woman – beautiful, powerful, confident, sexy, thoughtful, and deep. All the things I knew I was inside… even though I was only 4.”
― Ari Graynor
“By 12, my body had changed, although instead of blossoming into Cindy Mancini from ‘Can’t Buy Me Love,’ I more closely resembled Chunk from ‘The Goonies.’ My inside world may have been filled with a poetic and vital feminine life force, but the outside world saw and told me otherwise.”
― Ari Graynor
“I don’t know what I would have done without acting. I officially fell into it around age 6 in a class play that reimagined ‘The Ugly Duckling.’ My joy in performing was so boundless, you would have thought I’d just won a Tony.”
― Ari Graynor
“At 21, my career took a comedic turn when I was cast in a new Broadway play called ‘Brooklyn Boy,’ by Donald Margulies, which was equal parts funny and sad. I realized that the more seriously I expressed my character’s feelings, the funnier the scene became.”
― Ari Graynor
“There’s a lot of schlock out there.”
― Ari Graynor
“Sometimes you can get stuck doing the same kind of thing over and over again, and then there’s a certain moment in your life when you say, ‘Wait, there’s all this other stuff in me and all this other life.’”
― Ari Graynor
“It’s such a tough business. And once people see you a certain way, it’s really hard for them to change their minds about you.”
― Ari Graynor
“The real heart of comedy is uncovering a truth about yourself or about the world that you didn’t see.”
― Ari Graynor
“I’ve always sort of felt like I was from another time. The ’70s is more my vibe. The clothes fit me better.”
― Ari Graynor
“I have the personality where, although my ego can be healthy, sometimes I also feel like people won’t remember me, or they won’t know who I am.”
― Ari Graynor
“As an actor, these kinds of big-comedic-centerpiece characters is just one thing that I love to do.”
― Ari Graynor
“Don’t believe anything you read on Wikipedia!”
― Ari Graynor
“Humans are complex, and I think in entertainment in general, it’s very easy to put people in boxes.”
― Ari Graynor
“I was playing a lot of bigger, sort-of-comedic characters in slightly heightened realities, and it had been so fun and fulfilling for a long time. But it got to a point where I just felt like I didn’t have that in me anymore.”
― Ari Graynor
“You know what no one tells you about driving a truck? You are driving a truck. There are only side mirrors, and it does not handle like a Prius.”
― Ari Graynor
“I think ‘Nick and Norah’ was a huge deal for me. It was my first foray into the studio world, and that character was such a gift.”
― Ari Graynor
“As an actor, there’s no faking it.”
― Ari Graynor
“Sometimes you can fall into bad habits on film or rest on your laurels, and you can’t do that in theater. I think it’s such a useful tool as a person and as an actor to go back and forth between those two mediums.”
― Ari Graynor
“Henry Winkler is the most lovable man. He is like everybody’s favorite grandfather.”
― Ari Graynor
“Women care about their friends.”
― Ari Graynor
“It is mind-boggling to me that there are so few movies about female friendship, considering women make up half the movie-going population.”
― Ari Graynor
“When I was a kid, I did dial the 900 numbers out of curiosity, but I was such a goodie-two-shoes that I immediately hung up because I didn’t want it showing up on the bill.”
― Ari Graynor
“There are a lot of female characters out there that, when they fall on hard times, they sort of stew in their fears and negativities and vulnerabilities. And there’s something that’s really truthful about that – when I’ve gone through hard times or breakups, I’ve spent a lot of time on my couch overeating and crying with friends, that’s true.”
― Ari Graynor
“I’ve been really interested and inspired by Nan Goldin, the photographer.”
― Ari Graynor
“At the end of the day, if you’re an actor, you want to act. And it’s not something you can do in the living room alone. If you’re a painter, you can paint at home. If you write music, you can write on your own.”
― Ari Graynor
“More and more, people probably associate me in this world of comedy and these confident, brassy, big ladies, which I love, but my insides and who I feel like internally and the kind of work that I hope to continue doing feels very different from that.”
― Ari Graynor
“I’ve been calling myself ‘just an actor’ since I was 6 years old. That’s a long time.”
― Ari Graynor
“The truth is, there are so few female roles in movies. That’s really limiting. As an actor, you wanna be able to sink your teeth into something. You don’t want to just be the best friend. You don’t want to just be the girlfriend.”
― Ari Graynor
“If I’m gonna stay in this world of comedy, then it has to be a really special character to me in a really smart piece of material.”
― Ari Graynor
“I’ve always just admired women who were able to navigate through dramatic and comedic waters and sort of do it all.”
― Ari Graynor
“I don’t have to fear that if I do more comedy I’m not going to get to do everything I want. I’ll get to do my ‘Yentl.’”
― Ari Graynor
“My worst nightmare when I was in school was that I would get into trouble. I never got in trouble. I was a good student.”
― Ari Graynor
“Acting was the place where I could be free and feel confident.”
― Ari Graynor
“I’m such a theater geek. Most of my friends are in this community, and it’s really important for me to keep doing it. It takes the ego out of acting, whereas movies tend to involve it.”
― Ari Graynor
“As an actor, your life is constant ups and downs. My friends and I joke that when a job ends and nothing is lined up, you have nothing to do for the rest of your life. You just ride that wave.”
― Ari Graynor
“I love to cook for people. I equate food with love.”
― Ari Graynor
“I require a lot of stimulation, and there’s so much I’ve learned being in front of the camera, I felt like I had more to give behind it.”
― Ari Graynor
“Our everyday lives exist with comedy and tragedy next to each other.”
― Ari Graynor
“While I’m Jewish, the Hasidic world is still foreign to me. But I do understand some of the ideas of tradition and family and faith of our shared culture.”
― Ari Graynor
“When you get into comparisons in any way of, ‘we want it to be like this’ or ‘we don’t want it to be like this,’ it takes away from the authenticity of what you’re trying to say and what you’re trying to make.”
― Ari Graynor
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