Wealth & Money Quote by James D'arcy

There is a quiet defiance in D'Arcy's refusal to treat acting as a ladder to a shinier life. In an industry engineered around aspiration, he’s choosing anti-aspiration as a kind of armor. "I don't have any expectations" reads less like passivity than like a strategy: if you detach your self-worth from outcomes you can’t control (casting, press cycles, box office), you reclaim the one thing actors actually own - the work.

The second clause sharpens the point. By naming "rich and famous" bluntly, he punctures the polite fiction that success just happens to talented people. He’s acknowledging the obvious temptation, then declaring it insufficient. That’s a subtle way of telling you what he wants instead: craft, longevity, maybe unpredictability. It’s also a preemptive correction to celebrity culture’s default narrative, where every career arc is assumed to be a bid for more visibility.

The subtext is partly class and partly self-preservation. Expectations are expensive; they invite bitterness when the machine does what the machine does. D'Arcy's line positions him as a professional rather than a brand, a worker rather than an influencer, which carries cachet in a moment when actors are asked to perform constant likability online.

Of course, there’s a wink of self-awareness: saying you’re not driven by fame is itself a reputation move. It signals taste, seriousness, and a preference for respect over hype - the kind of statement that makes an actor seem, paradoxically, more worth watching.