Daily Inspiration Quote by Richard Wilson

Wilson’s line has the clean, almost old-fashioned swagger of a working actor who’s seen how culture actually reaches people: not through lofty “gateways,” but through whatever screens happen to be in front of them. The word “responsibility” is doing double duty. It’s ethical (I owe you something) and practical (I’m in charge of what gets through). He’s not talking about chasing awards or prestige; he’s framing selection itself as a form of care.

The real subtext is an argument about access. “Local theater” isn’t a knock on small towns so much as a shorthand for the limits of geography, programming, and taste-making. A “screen” becomes a pipeline: festivals, television, streaming, curated series - any platform that can smuggle the wider world into places where the wider world doesn’t reliably arrive. He’s positioning himself less as a performer and more as a mediator between audiences and an industry that often assumes the audience will come to it.

There’s also a sly power claim buried in the humility. If you decide what people “would never see,” you’re admitting that audiences aren’t simply choosing from infinite options; they’re choosing from what gets offered. Wilson is staking out a curator’s authority, but justifying it with populist intent: expanding taste rather than narrowing it.

Context matters: for actors of his generation, “screening” evokes the era when art films, international work, and politically prickly stories lived or died on distribution. Wilson’s responsibility isn’t to entertain the audience he already has. It’s to enlarge the audience’s possible world.