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Daily Inspiration Quote by Rod Taylor

"Apart from being interested in a good role, I think it's necessary to make up your mind as to whether it will make a movie that will entertain an audience all over the world and not just in your own backyard"

About this Quote

Acting, in Rod Taylor's telling, is less about chasing prestige than about respecting the basic math of the medium: movies are expensive, borderless products that either travel or they die. The line has the breezy pragmatism of a working actor who came up when the studio system was loosening, international markets were tightening, and "a good role" was no longer the sole currency that kept you employed. Taylor isn't dismissing craft; he's setting it against the brutal gatekeeping question every star learns to ask: will anyone outside my immediate cultural bubble pay to watch this?

The subtext is a quiet rebuke to insular ambition. "Your own backyard" isn't just geography; it's taste, tribe, and the comforting delusion that acclaim at home equals significance. Taylor frames global appeal as a responsibility, not a compromise, which is revealing. He's normalizing the idea that entertainment value isn't a dirty word, and that a film's capacity to communicate across accents, politics, and local references is a skill in itself. In that sense, he's arguing for a kind of cinematic Esperanto: clear stakes, legible emotion, story that doesn't require insider credentials.

Context matters, too. Taylor's career was built on big, exportable spectacles (The Time Machine, The Birds) where concept and momentum do a lot of the talking. His quote reads like the professional ethos behind that filmography: choose work that lets the audience in, wherever they are, because that's how movies become culture rather than just community theater with a camera.

Quote Details

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Citation Formats

APA Style (7th ed.)
Taylor, Rod. (2026, January 16). Apart from being interested in a good role, I think it's necessary to make up your mind as to whether it will make a movie that will entertain an audience all over the world and not just in your own backyard. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/apart-from-being-interested-in-a-good-role-i-129021/

Chicago Style
Taylor, Rod. "Apart from being interested in a good role, I think it's necessary to make up your mind as to whether it will make a movie that will entertain an audience all over the world and not just in your own backyard." FixQuotes. January 16, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/apart-from-being-interested-in-a-good-role-i-129021/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"Apart from being interested in a good role, I think it's necessary to make up your mind as to whether it will make a movie that will entertain an audience all over the world and not just in your own backyard." FixQuotes, 16 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/apart-from-being-interested-in-a-good-role-i-129021/. Accessed 13 Feb. 2026.

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About the Author

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Rod Taylor (born January 11, 1930) is a Actor from Australia.

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