We are not the originators of the story. I think it's actually the opposite when you're an actor. You're telling somebody else's story.
The actors nowadays, both young men and young ladies, don't always wear their period clothes as well as they might. They tend to stomp around a bit in them.
Improv as an actor makes you present in the moment. You listen, you're attentive. You're not acting so much as reacting, which is what you're doing in life all the time.
Your primary tools, as an actor, are observation and imagination. You can pretty much get everything you need from that, and you do. It brings back that element of pretend.
I think I'm an actor because I have very strong imagination and empathy. I never studied acting, but those two qualities are exactly the qualities that make for an activist.
As an actor, you can certainly, at any moment and at any time, discover 400 people who think you're stupid, fat and ugly.
T.V.'s weird because it's both the greatest gig as an actor potentially because it can be all this work for all this time, but there are so many question marks at every stage of the process.
In the editing room, 20 percent of the time you're using stuff from before the actor knew the camera was rolling or you're taking a line from somewhere else and putting it in his mouth.
No one gave a crap that I was the kid from 'Free Willy'. You're not in some wispy fantasyland where everyone's telling you 'yes' all the time, which happens a lot to actors.
I'm certainly not one of those actors who remain in a dark place the entire time in order to be doing the scene. I sort of come in and out of it. It can be to the detriment of my performance sometimes!
I usually don't say anything to the actors. It works better for me because when they come to the set, they are at the same time scared and excited because they are not well aware of what will happen.
Only one of us would usually sing lead. Which most of the time was, Mickey or Dave. They thought it was perfectly a natural routine, because Mickey and Dave saw themselves as TV actors.
I feel like people who come out to Los Angeles hoping to be an actor give up too easily, and/or they don't put in the amount of time that it really does take.
Sometimes you go into a film and you have no time to prepare and have to compress the details into a few days and then rely on the instinct and what happens when you're in a scene with other actors and that chemistry or not.
I'm not so bothered by the audition process anymore; in fact, I use it. It's a time for the actor to actually get to the know the director and the producers a little bit, too.
Being an actor, imitating to the point of inhabiting the lives of others, may simply be a way of continuing to do what I learned to do as a boy - to travel, mentally and physically.
The hardest thing is for me to let the work go and let myself just live. Every actor is different; they each have their own strengths and weaknesses; trust and ease are mine.
I have no desire to direct at all. I know how much pressure it is, and, trust me, it's so much easier and so much more fun to be an actor.
As an actor, I've always found that my job is not to judge the content in which I've agreed to perform in. What I try to do is just find the truth in every moment that they've written.
Cavendish Look-A-Like Actor: This is a violation of the ruddy Incarceration Act! I will not be subjugated to criminal abuse!
Leo Bloom: Actors are not animals! They're human beings! Max Bialystock: They are? Have you ever eaten with one?
