"I've always tried to be an actor who... I just plod on and try to keep my mouth shut, mind my own business. I find the whole thing about people's lives... I can't understand it. I'm always astonished that people want to know anything about me"
About this Quote
The subtext is a quiet rebuke to the celebrity economy that mistakes access for intimacy. "Keep my mouth shut" lands as both self-protection and moral hygiene: don t feed the machine that turns private life into public content. When he says he can t understand people wanting to know anything about him, he s not playing coy; he s pointing to a category error. Audiences love characters, press cycles love narratives, but the actor s actual life is often irrelevant to the work. Gambon is insisting on that boundary, even as the boundary has been eroding for decades.
Context matters: he came up in a theater-rooted tradition where mystique was less a marketing plan than a byproduct of discretion. His astonishment reads like generational whiplash in an era of red-carpet confessionals and algorithmic oversharing. It s also a canny performance of its own - the anti-performance that preserves the one performance he cares about: the one onstage or onscreen.
Quote Details
| Topic | Humility |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
| Cite |
Citation Formats
APA Style (7th ed.)
Gambon, Michael. (2026, January 16). I've always tried to be an actor who... I just plod on and try to keep my mouth shut, mind my own business. I find the whole thing about people's lives... I can't understand it. I'm always astonished that people want to know anything about me. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/ive-always-tried-to-be-an-actor-who-i-just-plod-97159/
Chicago Style
Gambon, Michael. "I've always tried to be an actor who... I just plod on and try to keep my mouth shut, mind my own business. I find the whole thing about people's lives... I can't understand it. I'm always astonished that people want to know anything about me." FixQuotes. January 16, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/ive-always-tried-to-be-an-actor-who-i-just-plod-97159/.
MLA Style (9th ed.)
"I've always tried to be an actor who... I just plod on and try to keep my mouth shut, mind my own business. I find the whole thing about people's lives... I can't understand it. I'm always astonished that people want to know anything about me." FixQuotes, 16 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/ive-always-tried-to-be-an-actor-who-i-just-plod-97159/. Accessed 21 Feb. 2026.




