Daily Inspiration Quote by Bruce Boxleitner

Boxleitner’s line has the easy charm of a backstage aside, but it’s also a neat piece of brand management: acting framed not as vanity, but as sanctioned experimentation. “Try out lots of things” sounds casual, even playful, yet it quietly defends the profession against the familiar jab that actors are just pretending for attention. The subtext is permission. An actor gets to test-drive identities, habits, even moral temperatures, and walk away without the real-world consequences the rest of us pay for our reinventions.

What makes the quote work is its shift from product to process. He’s not talking about fame, applause, or “becoming” a character in some mystical way. He’s talking about access. Roles become a kind of cultural lab where you can sample experiences that might be off-limits, risky, or simply unrealistic in ordinary life. That’s especially resonant for a working actor like Boxleitner, whose career spans the sturdy mainstream of American genre storytelling (from TV leads to sci-fi iconography) where reinvention is part of the job description: one season you’re a heroic commander, the next a compromised authority figure.

There’s a sly humility here too. “Try out” implies provisionality; it undercuts the grandiose rhetoric of “transformations” and “genius.” Acting becomes adult play with a paycheck, but also a disciplined empathy machine: you rehearse ways of being until they feel credible. In an era that demands constant personal “authenticity,” Boxleitner’s point is almost subversive. Authenticity, he suggests, can be practiced.