Fatherhood Quote by Rene Auberjonois

Auberjonois smuggles a whole worldview into that throwaway phrase "good Swiss puritan". It’s affectionate, a little amused, and quietly bracing: a father’s moral discipline reframed as craft discipline. The line doesn’t romanticize acting as charisma or destiny; it treats it like work you earn the right to do. In a business that often sells the myth of effortless talent, his father’s insistence reads like a corrective to glamour, the kind that prizes competence over attention.

The key move is the repetition: "not just be an actor, I should know about the whole process". That’s not an anti-actor jab; it’s anti-narrowness. It suggests a household where performance is tolerated only if it comes with literacy in what performance depends on: rehearsal, staging, design, directing, the unflashy machinery that makes a moment look inevitable. The subtext is almost Protestant: if you’re going to take up a calling others might dismiss as frivolous, you’d better treat it as a disciplined trade.

Culturally, this lands as an origin story for a certain kind of actor - the ensemble-minded professional who can thrive onstage, in repertory, in long-running TV, inside other people’s visions. It also hints at class and immigrant-adjacent respectability politics: the arts are acceptable when they’re demystified, when you can explain the job. Auberjonois isn’t defending acting; he’s revealing how he learned to outwork its stereotypes.