Wealth & Money Quote by Jim McKay

McKay’s line lands like a plainspoken gut-check, and that’s the point: he’s puncturing the myth that acting is purely about talent or “wanting it enough.” By stacking negatives - not attractive, not moneyed, not hip - he sketches a social triage system in which confidence isn’t an inner resource so much as a privilege rationed out by status. The repetition of “and” reads like a tally sheet, the way insecurity accumulates in real time when you’re young and watching culture hand the microphone to someone else.

The sharp move is that he doesn’t call aspiring actors vain; he calls the pipeline brutal. “Want to be an actor” becomes less a dream and more a symptom of having been told, early and often, that you’re worth looking at. In McKay’s framing, the industry’s notorious gatekeeping starts before the casting call. It starts in the mirror, in the cafeteria, in the small humiliations that teach a kid what kinds of bodies and backgrounds get rewarded with attention.

Context matters: McKay came up in an era when television and Hollywood sold a narrow template of charisma - overwhelmingly white, polished, well-connected. As a journalist, he’s diagnosing a feedback loop between media and self-esteem: the screen creates the hierarchy, then recruits from the people most likely to thrive under it. The quote isn’t anti-acting; it’s anti-fantasy, insisting that “confidence” is often just the afterglow of being chosen.