Aging & Wisdom Quote by Raul Julia

There’s a deliciously compact origin story hiding in Raul Julia’s recollection: his “first role” wasn’t a prince or a hero, but the devil, played at an age when most kids are still learning what a role even is. The line works because it’s both disarming and quietly declarative. Julia isn’t bragging about precocity; he’s pointing to an early comfort with the shadowy, the mischievous, the socially coded “bad.” For an actor, that’s not a confession so much as a compass.

The subtext is about performance as transgression. To “play the devil” in childhood is to be handed a mask that adults fear, then invited to wear it safely. That’s theater’s oldest bargain: we rehearse taboo so it doesn’t own us. Julia’s delivery (in the way the quote remembers itself: “I was like five or six”) keeps it conversational, almost throwaway, which makes the content land harder. He’s implying that identity is something you try on, not something you inherit intact.

Context matters, too. Julia’s career was defined by elegance plus danger - characters that radiated charm while hinting at menace or moral complexity. Hearing that his first brush with acting was literally embodying temptation reframes later work as continuity rather than coincidence. It also nods to the cultural machinery that produces “the devil” as a role in the first place: religion, folklore, and family pageantry turning fear into spectacle. Julia remembers it with affection, like he’s telling you the secret of how charisma gets built: start with the forbidden, then learn to make it human.