Through all of this lovely interviewing, and nice things people say, and the rest of it, I have learned that I am an actor. That is my profession. That is my job. That is how I make a living. So I am just out there making a living.
The first audition I ever went on, I was accompanied by my mother at the instruction of my father. 'You have to learn how to take rejection if you really want to be an actor,' he said. He had to eat his own words. I got the job.
When you're working on a film, it's almost like photographing paintings at a museum. You're photographing somebody else's world. I just try and interpret it and make it real, and make it what the actors are about, what the director is about, and what...
I mean one of the weird things about TV and one of the things that some actors don't like but I kind of dig is that you never know where you're headed, I mean you never know what the writer might think of next.
I did four or five years in telly, and by the end of it was drained. I was a bit sick of myself. I didn't feel like an actor anymore. That sounds silly, but when you're doing a play you're using different muscles, and it blew all the cobwebs away.
When Orson Welles was acting in 'Compulsion,' the director Richard Fleischer let him just take over and direct the courtroom scenes. To be able to see Welles - who knew more about directing than anyone - direct himself and the other actors, it was un...
I think, you know, as an actor we get these terribly sort of pretentious ideas in our heads. We try to take everything very seriously at first, you know, until we lighten up, we get onboard, and have a laugh.
When I started, I was an artist; I wanted to be an artist. I became an actor almost by accident. I acted for fifteen years and tried to produce. I looked for stories that were the story beneath the story that you thought you knew, like 'The Candidate...
There's a lot of actors I think that appear so much more together as the characters they portray as opposed to the actual people, so I know I've said this before: Hollywood's not a place where you're rewarded for growing up.
I was very frustrated, in a physical sense, by people seeing me in a way that I wasn't. And I was beginning to find myself boxed into a corner. Hopefully things have loosed up a bit, and I've gotten better and become more relaxed as an actor.
It's also that comedians don't have the kind of narcissism that actors have. They're writers who perform their own material. It's more interesting. And they're sexy because they risk more. Stand-up comedians risk more than anyone.
When I look in the mirror, I see the ageing process at full pelt, the hairline in retreat, the bags under the eyes growing and darkening, that kind of thing. I suppose it would be easier if I weren't an actor, but I am fairly philosophical about it.
For a while I thought about studying medicine at school and becoming a doctor because I've always been interested in psychology and how people's minds operate. But I'm able to explore some of that as an actor and ultimately I think it seems more inte...
In orthodox film-making, you never shoot sequentially - but with improv, obviously every move you make has a knock-on effect; it is a cumulative process. I have improvised, on the non-scripted 'Timecode.' It can become entirely indulgent: actors smas...
I'm not so in a rush to direct just anything because I'm lucky that I can make a living so far as an actor and not have to worry about that as a director. And so I can be a little more choosy in things I direct.
I feel so comfortable in an acting role, you know, as an actor. Maybe it's because I came into it late. If anything, I've felt frustrated that I can't carry a film because everything since 'District 9' has been supporting roles.
The most clear way to decide the actor is to watch them doing stuff during their downtime. When they do something that's making both of you laugh, you see if there's a character or situation that could be written into.
I'm probably an actor that tends to, instead of putting things on, think about it more in terms of taking away what's not in the character, until I'm left with what is. If that makes sense. That's probably a particularly American way of working, but ...
As an actor, I was a fantastic rebel. Then I became a directorial rebel and understood rebels from both sides. So now I am a friend who gives advice - not one who knows more, necessarily, but who shares ideas.
I discovered that I wanted to be an actor back when I did my first play in junior high. I've been doing theater in junior high and high school, and I just kept feeding the fire, kept wanting to pursue acting full-on.
I don't know if there's an actors' slow-pitch softball league I could join. My agency has a team, but they say it would be a conflict of interest for the people they rep to play because I could hit a pop-up and they'd have to drop it on purpose.
