Daily Inspiration Quote by Sharon Gless

Casting is often talked about like alchemy, but Sharon Gless drags it back to the gut-level moment: the instant recognition that a role fits, or the equally useful jolt that it doesn’t. Her line is casual, almost tossed off, and that’s part of its authority. Actors are trained to make emotion look repeatable; here she admits the opposite - that the real decision starts as an involuntary reaction.

The key word is “believe.” Gless isn’t describing whether a script is good, or whether the character is likable. She’s naming a private test of integrity: can I inhabit this without lying? “Don’t believe it” signals a mismatch between the performer’s internal truth and the material’s demands. It’s not moral purity so much as craft. Audiences can smell false commitment, especially in television, where a character has to live week after week without the actor winking at it.

Context matters: Gless came up in an era when actresses were routinely offered parts built from shorthand - the wife, the victim, the decorative professional. Her comment reads like a quiet refusal of roles that ask for compliance instead of imagination. The subtext is agency. In a business that treats actors as interchangeable, she frames choice as a form of self-protection: trust the bodily “something” before the industry talks you out of it.

It also hints at the invisible labor of taste. That “something” is experience compressed into instinct, the years of learning what you can sell convincingly and what will cost you credibility.