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Milo ventimiglia insights

Explore a captivating collection of Milo ventimiglia’s most profound quotes, reflecting his deep wisdom and unique perspective on life, science, and the universe. Each quote offers timeless inspiration and insight.

You've got this world, these pathologists that are, day in and day out, taking apart bodies, coming up with theories about how they died and how to better serve the community. At the same time these people have lives outside and families and my character in particular, he has a fiance and things are going well for him, so you've got to show that nice warm compassionate side at the same time you've got to show the steely, icy cool of a doctor. Not only that, but a doctor who gets a bit of a God complex and starts killing people for sport.

How can you sustain life? [Dan] Fogelman is magic, and I think the other scripts of his that I've read for this show specifically are as beautiful as the pilot script [of This Is Us]. And he said it in a meeting [regarding the stillbirth of a child], "You can't kill a baby every week." But I think the idea that you can have these impactful moments that are as heightened as the loss of a child - it's life.

I don't like to have to depend on someone else to reset the props. It's like, "No, you've gotta take responsibility for it." I know how things fit and feel. To reset that stuff myself, it's easy. The prop guys are hilarious because I'll have one set of gloves and I'll keep reusing them to get the most out of it. They're like, "We've got boxes of these."

The older I get, the easier it is to just be present in the moment, and understand what a man is going through.

I pretty much grew up in the Clubber Lang/Ivan Drago era. That was more my time. I've always been a fan of the films, even the fifth, that I know some people didn't care for, I've always enjoyed them.

I think that's something that always enticed me about the '40s - back then, the glamour and the style - you couldn't really make it up. You just were or you weren't. You either fit in that world or you fit in the other. Things were very cut and dry. Things were simple. There wasn't a whole lot of excess or flash to be flashy; it was real flash, and real excitement.

You have to have sympathy for the villain. Even the most disgusting ones, you have to find something to connect with. I try to put as much of myself in every single character that I play.

Every job built my career in some way or made me grow as a person or I got to meet someone great. I had one line on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, but I met Will Smith and he took 20 minutes out of his day to talk to the kid with one line. To this day, I think that guy is amazing because of that.

I think that any good storytelling lends itself to closing a chapter but also knowing that there's a few more volumes beyond that to dream off of.

[Sylvester Stallone] and I still touch base. I found out he was a fan of Heroes. That's kind of an amazing thing, when you look up to someone for so many years and they're actually following what you're doing. That's really a nice thing to know.

I saw so many kids 22, 19, with holes the size of a dime and they're dead. It's a gunshot and of course those kids thought they were as tough as nails, they never expected to be dead but they're gone. It's kinda nice to walk out of the County Coroner's Office with a couple of sayings, you know? "You're not so tough being dead on a morgue table."

I think I had the good fortune to watch Sly the Artist [Sylvester Stallone]; to watch him in all arenas. As an actor, not many people get to see him turn that character on, they don't understand that he's playing a role.

Sometimes I'm an ass, sometimes I'm sweet as peaches.

I love being around people that contribute. It doesn't matter where the good idea comes from. A good idea is a good idea.

Unless I'm running and yelling, then you really see how crooked my mouth is!

My job is always going to change; the characters that I'm playing are always going to change. I look forward to playing a grandfather at some point.

[Sylvester] Stallone and I were in a meeting for Rocky Balboa. We were laughing about something, and he looks at my mouth and says to the casting director, "Wow, your lip even hooks down like mine does." Then he looked at the casting director and nodded, and I guess that was the nod of saying, "Hire this kid." So yeah, I have a really crooked mouth. They don't work, but I can feel everything.

Think about the physical act of pulling a trigger. The amount of pressure it takes to pull a trigger or the speed it takes to shove a sharp object into somebody. The psychology behind it. Why people kill? Why people don't kill?

It's a great place to be at 36 because you're an adult and you're responsible for how you impact other people, the direction of your own life [too], but you're also young enough to say, "You know what? I'm not sure of where I'm at, and I'm going to change that course and do something different. I'm going to look at life differently." I think that's the magic of that age.

I've got two older sisters, which I think was the best thing, but also the worst thing. They dressed me up like a girl, but at the same time I think they taught me a lot of what they experienced and what they lived through, and passed that on to me as a young man and influenced how I approached not only women, but people. I got very lucky with the family I was born into. From my older sisters to my mother and father, they're just good, kind-hearted people.

It's an all-inclusive package, when you get to be creative and run a little country while you're on a set and doing it with people that you enjoy working with and you all have a say in it.

I think with actors, we tend to get rid of characters - and not get rid of them as in discard them or throw them away, but it's just that you take that jacket off because you're going to be putting a different jacket on.

I try to find something in everyone that I play - even the most heinous ones. You have to find something that is real and vulnerable about everything that you play.

You have to pay attention to the work on the page and make it as good as possible because it could be your last.

I just try not to subscribe to the ways of celebrity. I'm not a celebrity, I'm a working actor. A lot of the events -- the parties and the premieres that people go to to get noticed -- I'm just not into. I'll hang out with my friends, go see punk shows, read at home. At the same time, I have a production company, which is a lot of work.

I'm a homebody. I'd rather be in the kitchen cooking than hanging out in a bar.

When I was born, they didn't work. They're broken, the nerves in my lower left lip. When I was kid, I would talk out of the side of my face. When I was 16 and came up to Hollywood from Orange County, I was in this cattle call audition for Batman and Robin at Warner Bros., and they interviewed me out front of the studio. When I got home, I was like, "Oh, this was exciting!" But then when I watched the news, I was like, "Mom, what is wrong with my mouth?!"

Sometimes you're working in highly emotional scenes and you'll get lost in the moment. You're having fun with your friend at work. It's an opportunity to give to them as much as they've given back to you.

I don't feel the pressure to deliver an unrealistically great man to the screen; I just want to be honest to who my character is on the page. If I can reflect that and put some heart into him and make him real, then I think I've done my job, and I think that people will like who he is.

People forget that actors are actors, who are looking to put on the clothes and the character, and then shed it just as easily.

There were a million different things I could have chosen or wanted to do, but the path of an artist was the one that pulled me the most. I did local theater and plays in school. I think there was a sense of entertaining - being on the stage, making people laugh, making people cry - that I was drawn to. It was also one of those things like, "I can do this for a very long time."

It's [high school] an interesting time in your life because you're trying to act older and mature but you really have no idea what you're doing. You're scared and it's okay to be scared. It's okay to not know completely what you want or what you should be doing and to stumble a little bit.

I don't want to impose on anyone else and make anyone else emotional or anything. I tend to quietly cry, kind of turn away.

Some were getting married; some were getting divorced. People were in different places, but you had enough time on this earth to actually get somewhere, and I think that's the exciting thing about being 36 and in your mid-30s. You've been somewhere, and you're going to go somewhere. It's fun; it's exciting.

When your a kid,everybody runs around witha red cape-we all wanted to be SUPERMAN or BATMAN.

TV is such a success nowadays because it gives back in a way that features can't. If you go to a film, you only get two hours of great storytellers and performers, and you pay top dollar for that. If you're subscribing to premium channels and you're getting all of these amazing TV shows, and you're watching them as you want, where you want, when you want, on what you want, I think that is the "the golden era of TV" in what television shows are offering to audiences. We're giving them a lot more. It's quality.

An audience gets to hang onto the characters for the rest of their lives if they want. I think it's great that the fans do that. It's just not too practical for a man like myself because I have to move on.

In THE WHISPERS, I played a father, with an amazingly talented actor, Kyle Breitkopf. I've played a dad a lot, so it's nice again to be in that world [in This Is Us].

I think we need to feel, to come together, to look at our differences as a benefit to who we are as people on the same planet.

I'm tough on the outside and soft on the inside [...] I'm really a shy guy.

I felt like it was something that didn't represent how I wanted to present myself. Now I'll see kids I come across on Twitter or Comic-Con, and they'll smile and I'll be like, "You have a crooked mouth like I have a crooked mouth!" We just sit there, and I talk about it with them and they feel better about themselves.

I try to be good to myself. Look, we're human and people have differences.

I tell people, "It's the hardest thing to explain, but it's the easiest thing to understand." And all anybody really needs to know is, the struggles of life, the joy of life, the excitement and the heartbreak of life is something we can all connect to. And I like to hope that the inclusivity of the show [This Is Us] is something that audiences will relate to.

For me, digital is just another avenue. It doesn't mean that it has to be poor quality or poor content. But, you still run into the same struggles. You can't have full-on language, violence or sexual situations. You can't run rampant with the fact that it's digital. You can't do anything you want. You still have a responsibility to tell a story first, and show what the character is going through first, and then maybe you have a little bit of lee-way to show a more real side of life.

I think there's an initial shedding of the skin of a character when you've played them for so long, almost like a snake losing its skin. But when a job is done, I kind of walk away from it because I know that I need to prep for whatever else I'm going onto - I need to get back to being myself, which... Who knows exactly who that is, with all the talking voices in my head. You know, back to being a bit of a blank slate again. It becomes a necessity as an actor - at least for the way that I act.

If you have your mind in the right direction, and your heart is full of the right kind of stuff, you'll succeed and you'll triumph over adversity, over really anything.

For me, what grabs my attention about the project is usually the character immediately and then the story, and then the people that are involved.

I was never one to stand on a soap box and say, "This is how you need to live your life!" It was never about that.

As an actor it's like, go with whatever excites you as an actor. What are you're going to invest yourself in as a character? What are you going to get into? Have a variety of characters to play.

[With] this show [This Is Us], I don't think I was seeking something outside of the world I'd always played in so much as I'm ruled by characters. If it's a great character, I'm invested. It doesn't matter what the genre, what the storyline, anything.

I hope everyone can give the audience that real, true experience. But Mandy [Moore] and I, we definitely jump decades, and I think trying to find a base look, so that I can go back to the Eighties, I can jump to the Nineties, it was like, "All right, Milo, you're living in a moustache for a little while." Which I'm perfectly fine with.

Certain things work for me, certain things don't. [Going out for drinks is] about connecting, hanging out, and having a reason to spend time together. But you don't really need any kind of reason, other than you want to spend time with somebody.

You have to be able to sustain life. So moments are going to be lighter, but moments are also going to be heavier. I think just the understanding that life goes in a million different directions, and hopefully, if you find excitement by what these characters are experiencing and what they're living through, and you're impacted by them as human beings, then that's the sustainability of the show [This is Us].

I learned that I'm not young enough to think I know everything. Honestly. I think you hit a certain point in life where you expect that you have so much to learn, and you may think that you've arrived, but you have kind of just begun.

Every single job I do. It sounds goofy but I did a music video for Fergie. I was in full on tattoos, ponytail, but it's like even things like that they help other people to see you in a different light. They give me opportunities. I try and change the image with every job that I can, it's just hard when you work on a TV show and you work so many months and trying to get away from that.

My sisters and mom raised me to respect women and open doors for them.

When you're in morgue you're seeing life that no longer exists. It gives you an appreciation when you look someone in the eye, you shake their hand, and you hug your friends, your girlfriend, your family. It just gives you an appreciation for the life that surrounds you. At the same time you understand how fragile it is. That you don't need to be an idiot or get so angry at times.

There's kind of like that fright and excitement all at the same time when you first see someone of his stature. Where its literally, "Oh my God, I can't believe I'm in the room with Sylvester Stallone." He disarms you. He lets you know when he talks to you, he speaks clearly, he'll make you laugh and he's very kind and warm hearted.

I used to sit when I was a kid, from 14 or 15 on, with a book or a paper or a magazine in front of a mirror and teach myself to speak with a more straight mouth, so it wasn't so pronounced.

My father was a very fun dad; he was always coaching our soccer sports teams, he made sure that we had activities to do. He was kind of goofy and fun. But at the same time, he had a lot of lessons to teach us so that we didn't grow up and just not be good people. I try and reflect a lot on how I was raised by my father in the character that I'm playing now in being a dad. You've got to be strong for these kids. You also have to be fun and teach them all the lessons, not just one, or two, or three.

I think there couldn't be a more perfect time with the state of the world than to come together and share an experience - especially an entertainment experience like This Is Us - to say, "You're different, and I'm different, but we all agree that life should be lived. You should be happy, and we're all deserving of joy."

Given the loss of a child or the birth of a child or anything like that, I think it's just I'm more moved by life, the older I get, so it's easier to connect to the characters that I play.