What 10 Actors Actually Think of Their Most Famous Lines

You know you’ve really hit the mark with fame in Hollywood when you have one line that gets repeated over and over again by millions of people. To be an actor who has “made it,” as the phrase is used, is to be a star who can be readily quoted by millions of fans and viewers from all over the globe. It takes a special level of fame to achieve that. Not every show—nor every actor—will have throngs of fans who can proudly quote them at the drop of a proverbial hat.

Yet some actors do reach that level of fame and adulation thanks to catchphrases that stick in the minds of viewers. Whether it be on television or in the movies, one-liners and memorable deliveries make for a celebrity’s quick trajectory into superstardom. And once there… life gets rough. Sure, we aren’t going to ask you to feel sorry for people who have made tons of money from saying a few lines on television. But things can be challenging in the post-fame realm for many stars who are tied to very specific catchphrases.

That’s what we’re after in this list, then: the real thoughts of ten actors who have been indelibly tied to certain catchphrases. These stars aren’t as gung ho about their iconic lines now as they were when the phrases were first delivered. Instead, they have very complicated relationships with the memorable lines that brought them into the public consciousness…

Related: 10 Actors Who Turned Down Movie Roles and Regretted It

10 Jim Parsons

When The Big Bang Theory first made it onto television, Jim Parsons’ character Sheldon Cooper immediately became known for his catchphrase “Bazinga.” The first few seasons of the nerd-centered show were chock full of scenes in which Parsons’s character dropped the line. But by the fourth season of the long-running show, the phrase started to turn a bit. For one, it was so overused early on that it came to have a negative reaction from fans and viewers. And more than that, Parsons and others on set quickly grew frustrated by the phrasing. So the show’s co-producer, Steve Holland, began looking for other phrases to replace it.

“We had a complicated relationship with ‘bazinga’ because it felt like it was becoming a catchphrase in a sort of not-great way, so we retired it almost entirely,” Holland explained when he was interviewed for the book The Big Bang Theory: The Definitive, Inside Story of the Epic Hit Series.

And while Parsons himself was a total pro about using the phrase as requested even after producers felt it had gone out of style, Holland wanted to be sensitive to his career anyway. “After season four or five, we almost never said it, but it was always the thing that was associated with Big Bang,” Holland continued. “And sometimes in a detrimental way because people would use it to mock the show sometimes. We maybe said it thirty times— if that—over the course of 279 episodes. But we couldn’t escape it. And yet, people loved it and latched on to it, and it was part of the show’s identifying features.”^[1]

9 Alyson Hannigan

It’s been two decades since Alyson Hannigan rocketed to fame with her role in American Pie, and people still haven’t forgotten her iconic one-liner in that coming-of-age movie. You know the one. Yeah, you do! Where her character says, “this one time, at band camp…” before the teenage brains in all of the world’s red-blooded men go into overdrive thinking about flutes and, uh, the things one can do with them. But for Alyson, while that line (and that entire movie) helped change her life for the better, it also altered quite a bit else about her world in the twenty-plus years since the film first hit theaters.

Most notably, as Hannigan explained recently on The Kelly Clarkson Show, that line has become a bit of an issue whenever she goes out in public with her young daughters! Considering how the line isn’t exactly safe for work, Alyson gets horrified when fans insist on reciting it in front of her family. “I have two daughters now,” Hannigan explained to Clarkson on the daytime TV talk show, “and when they’re with me and somebody starts saying the line, I’m like, ‘Can we just stop there?’ I get really panicked. ‘Yeah, yeah, I know what you’re talking about.’ I don’t want to have that conversation with them yet!” We understand that completely!^[2]

8 Matthew McConaughey

Few lines are more iconic than the one a (very) young Matthew McConaughey spit out in the film Dazed and Confused. As readers of a certain generation can already abundantly recall, Matthew delivered the memorable line “Alright, alright, alright” in his now-trademark, fully patented deep Texas twang. At the time, he was inspired by Jim Morrison, the late lead singer of The Doors. McConaughey decided to take Morrison’s lead and push forth to put the phrase into the movie. He just never thought that it would blow up as big as it did.

But guess what? Even now, more than three decades later, McConaughey doesn’t hate the iconic catchphrase. Nor is he sick of the attention that it brings him from fans! The A-list actor once explained his reasoning for that on The Tonight Show. “People ask me all the time, ‘Do you get tired of that?’ I said, ‘No. It’s the first three words I ever said on film 32 years ago. It precedes me.’ I thought I might just have a one-night hobby. It turned into a career. Please say it!” Honestly, that’s not a bad way to look at it. Gratitude is the right way to go with some of these catchphrases that have taken on lives of their own!^[3]

7 Christopher Walken

For years now, people have fallen in love with Christopher Walken’s line on Saturday Night Live during the cowbell skit with Will Ferrell. You know the one—when Walken belts out in front of a howling crowd, “I got a fever, and the only prescription is more cowbell!” It’s one of the most famous lines Walken has ever uttered, in fact. And that’s saying something, considering how incredible of a career he has had! But as it turns out, the actor is not a fan of the line. And he hates that Will Ferrell pushed him to say it on camera during that memorable SNL skit!

Almost immediately after the line first made it onto television in 2000, viewers picked up on it and began to deliver it to each other—and to Walken. Over the last two decades, the line has been used over and over again in front of him. Things got so bad that Walken once straight-up told Ferrell that the catchphrase had “ruined” his life.

Reflecting on accidentally ruining Walken’s life during a Tonight Show interview held years later, Ferrell recalled just how bad things were for him when Christopher called him out on pushing for the “cowbell” quip on camera: “I go to see Christopher Walken in a play, I say hello to him backstage, and he’s like, ‘You know, you’ve ruined my life. People during the curtain call bring cowbells and ring them. The other day, I went for an Italian food lunch, and the waiter asked if I wanted more cowbell with my pasta bolognese.’ And I think he was really mad at me [but] he had a little smile.” Sounds awful… but also hilarious!^[4]

6 Arnold Schwarzenegger

Few actors have had as memorable of a film career as Arnold Schwarzenegger. The bodybuilder turned actor (turned Governator!) has developed a whole cadre of catchphrases thanks to his various action movies. Of course, his two most notable ones are “I’ll be back” and “hasta la vista, baby.” Both are spoken in his now-iconic Austrian accent, too. So the effect of hearing those intimidating phrases is heightened, considering his thick accent and powerful tone of voice. Naturally, they would turn into meme-worthy phrases that viewers have gone on to repeat for decades at this point.

The cool thing about this, though, is that Arnold absolutely loves hearing those phrases when he’s out and about in public! Even more than that, he’s also happy to repeat them for his fans when they come up to him on the street. Recounting those very common interactions on a daytime TV talk show a few years back, the former Governor of California explained: “You know, the funny thing about it is that none of those lines we knew are going to be big hits. You say those things, but then the movie comes, and people come up to you. I had not the foggiest idea that this would be the most quoted line in movie history. It’s wild.” Wild, indeed!^[5]

5 Paris Hilton

You may wish you didn’t know Paris Hilton’s catchphrase, but you totally do. You know, the socialite-turned-reality TV star rose to fame along with co-star Nicole Richie on The Simple Life a couple of decades ago. While the duo took the television world by storm for a while, their show was eventually forgotten in favor of even crazier reality TV fare in the ensuing decades. What wasn’t forgotten, though, was Paris’ iconic catchphrase. Every single time that something cool happened, she needed only two words to categorize it: “That’s hot.” Yep. Hot, indeed.

But here’s the crazy part: While the phrase quickly came to be synonymous with Paris, she wasn’t the one who came up with it! Instead, it was her sister Nicky Hilton who originated the phrase. Soon after Nicky began using it privately, Paris took it on. And then, when The Simple Life blew up on television screens all across America, the pump was primed, and the phrase came on at the perfect time to catapult all across the country. Paris even went so far as to trademark it to protect her business interests! She’s nothing if not smart.

Recalling the situation in her memoir years later, Paris explained: “At some point, I heard Nicky say, ‘That’s hot,’ and it resonated with me. I wrote it in my diary and doodled flowers and fireworks around it. It’s such a great statement, isn’t it? Positive. Unpretentious. The word hot is evocative; there’s energy in it. Suddenly, there seemed to be a lot of things in my world that deserved this little accolade, and I recorded them faithfully in my diary. Mom got me markers with glitter in them. That’s hot. We learned how to diagram sentences. That’s hot. Nicole [Richie] is sleeping over the whole weekend. That’s hot.” And from there, she became the catchphrase king! Er, queen.^[6]

4 Gary Coleman

Gary Coleman literally grew up on television. Of course, he was the foremost star and the most memorable actor on the sitcom Diff’rent Strokes. During his time in the spotlight there as a very young child and later through his adulthood, his catchphrase was one of the first meme-worthy moments of the television era. You know the one: “Whatchu talkin’ ’bout, Willis?” It seems like people today still use that phrase all the time in jest with their friends and family members. Heck, younger people—those who weren’t even born until well after the height of Coleman’s television reign—get into the act! But Gary himself quickly got over it. And then, he just wanted it to go away.

Sadly, Coleman died in 2010 at the relatively young age of 42. But right up until his untimely passing, fans who found him in random places around Los Angeles or elsewhere would invariably come up to him and call out his catchphrase. Coleman’s longtime friend Ron Jeremy (yes, the adult film actor) once recalled how much Gary hated those moments.

Speaking to Us Weekly about Coleman’s tortured relationship with the catchphrase that made him so famous in the first place, Jeremy explained that Coleman even once stormed off a film set when he was asked to say the line! “He was a sweet guy,” Jeremy told the magazine, “but he hated being asked to repeat [it]. He didn’t want to live in the past.” We can certainly understand that.^[7]

3 Jaleel White

Few catchphrases transcended television across the 1990s more thoroughly than did Jaleel White’s most memorable line on Family Matters. We’ll forgive you if you don’t recognize the name Jaleel, though. Surely, you recognize this name instead: Steve Urkle. That’s right! The nerdy kid from the sitcom set on the south side of Chicago truly took television by storm across pretty much the entire decade of the 1990s. And in every episode, he’d annoy the bejesus out of his next-door neighbor, Chicago cop Carl Winslow. So, inevitably, nerdy little Urkle would get into something he shouldn’t be involved with and then whine his way out of it with his locked-down line: “Did I do that?”

Can’t you just hear that whiny, nasally voice in your head as you read it to yourself? Yeah, we thought so. We can, too! Amazingly, the actor who made the phrase so iconic actually feels pretty strongly about the artistic inclinations that created the phrase in his head—and then urged it to spout forth from White’s mouth and into television infamy. See, Jaleel had no idea at the time that he could even create such a catchphrase and have it catch hold of imaginations nationwide.

“Back then, you didn’t really know what was going to be a catchphrase, what was gonna stick,” White explained years later during an Entertainment Weekly panel looking back at Family Matters and its impact on television. “Nowadays, things are so contrived, it’s like, ‘oh, we’ve got our catchphrase!’ and they’ll just drill it in your head, whether audiences like it or not. Sometimes, a delivery can mean more than what was actually said. So for a lot of things, like ‘Did I do that?’ it was just the delivery.” And what a brilliant delivery it was!^[8]

2 Wayne Knight

Wayne Knight is best known for playing the memorable character of Newman on the long-running sitcom Seinfeld. As you’ll no doubt recall, Newman was a man who lived in Jerry Seinfeld’s building in New York City. And to say the two of the characters didn’t get along in the script and on screen might be the understatement of the millennium. See, every time Newman showed up at Jerry’s apartment, he was always unwanted. And every time Jerry saw him arrive at the door, the stand-up comic would deliver a less-than-impressed pair of words: “Hello, Newman.” It didn’t take long before the phrase stuck!

Thankfully, Knight has a good sense of humor about it. Even after all these years, with thousands of people walking up to him in public and delivering the line to him, he still makes it a point to show his gratitude. But we’d be lying if we said he wasn’t also a little bit annoyed by it! That part is only natural.

Speaking to Vice about the line and its legacy still after so many decades of use, Newman (er, Knight) once said: “I honestly think that it’s more prevalent now than it was when the show was on the air originally because now you’ve got grandparents, parents, and kids, all of whom have discovered the show on their own time. I got fan mail from Yemen. What the f**k are you doing watching the show in Yemen? And everybody who comes up to me with the ‘Hello Newman’ or whatever still believes that no one else has ever said it. Or they’ll say, ‘You must hate this, but…’”^[9]

1 Steve Carell

The final catchphrase on this list is one of the funnier ones on television: that would be Steve Carell’s one-liner in The Office. Whenever the boss would be walking around at Dunder-Mifflin in Scranton, and he’d hear something from an employee that could possibly be misconstrued, Carell’s character would blurt out: “That’s what she said.” To be sure, it was a very funny catchphrase—you know, the first couple dozen times it landed. But soon, the phrase got overwhelmingly annoying for the rest of the show’s Dunder-Mifflin employees. Of course, that was the whole point of the thing, as it was used in the sitcom’s script. But now, so many years later, that catchphrase keeps coming back to bite the real-life Steve Carell in the ass!

“I’ll be walking around with my kids, and someone will roll down the window of their car and scream ‘That’s what she said’ with no context,” Carell recalled years later during an interview with BBC Radio. “And not even in response to some, you know, it wasn’t even a joke. No setup at all.” Frustrating enough for an actor—and deeply maddening for a comedian who wants to see a joke delivered all the way through from setup to punchline!

Carell continued fondly about the phrase, though: “It was fun in the moment, and certainly that character thought it was funny, which was the joke because it was even a bad joke back then. The character did not have a good sense of humor. So I think people forget that it was coming from a place of mockery, for starters.” That’s a good point. Context matters. Even in reciting catchphrases to actors who are sick of hearing them!^[10]