Parenting & Family Quote by Jeremy Irons

Irons’s line lands like a quiet scolding aimed in two directions: at his own tribe, and at the culture that profits from keeping them unserious. “Actors often behave like children” isn’t just a dig at ego and arrested development; it’s a diagnosis of an industry that rewards neediness, impulsiveness, and performative fragility. Celebrity runs on tantrums, oversharing, and the perpetual promise of the next reinvention. If actors lean into that, the audience gets trained to treat them not as workers with craft, but as mascots: cute, volatile, disposable.

The bite comes in the second clause: “and so we’re taken for children.” Irons acknowledges the feedback loop. When performers present themselves as whimsical or helpless, the public (and the press) respond with condescension, gossip, and a refusal to grant moral or intellectual seriousness. It’s not an argument for actors to be “respected” in the abstract; it’s a demand that respect has to be earned through comportment, not requested through awards campaigns.

“I want to be grown up” is blunt, even slightly plaintive, and that’s why it works. It reveals a specific hunger: to be seen as an adult in a business that infantilizes everyone, from the talent to the audience. Coming from Irons - a classically trained actor associated with authority roles and a patrician voice - the subtext is also brand-management with teeth: an insistence that craft, discipline, and restraint are their own form of rebellion against celebrity’s nursery.