Time & Perspective Quote by Shawn Ashmore

There’s a quiet relief baked into Ashmore’s phrasing: “above and beyond” signals he’s pushing back against the shallow version of fame where your calendar is full but your life isn’t. As an actor, he’s describing a workplace that’s supposed to look like a party from the outside, yet often runs on short-term intimacy and long stretches of isolation. The line recognizes that a “social life” can be a kind of noise, while a “core group” is infrastructure.

The repeated “work with” does more than emphasize professionalism; it reframes friendship as craft. Film and TV sets demand accelerated trust: you’re asked to be emotionally available on cue, hit marks, fail publicly, and do it again. Having people you “learn how to work with” suggests the real bond isn’t just hanging out after wrap, but developing a shared language under pressure. It’s teamwork as a form of belonging.

Even the modesty of “is a nice thing” feels telling. Actors are trained to underplay sincerity in public; sentiment can read as cheesy, self-indulgent, or PR-polished. So he lands on an almost bland adjective to smuggle in something weightier: stability. Subtextually, he’s pointing at how rare continuity is in gig culture, where every job resets your community to zero. The quote isn’t romantic about friendship; it’s practical. Connection, he implies, isn’t a perk of the job. It’s what makes the job survivable - and, at its best, creatively fluent.