I haven't been in a position to have the luxury to pick roles for most of my career, so I'm not practiced in that. Usually, when you want to be an actor, you take whatever comes along. If there's an audition, you go for it. If you get the job, you do...
I've always loved the power of stories to transport me to another world, to imagine extraordinary possibilities, to experience things I may not have access to in my regular life - like being a superhero! Also, I would always put on shows for my famil...
My father was brought up in an orphanage in the Catskills. He was a factory worker. And because his family wasn't there for him, family was everything. We could disagree inside the house, but outside the house it was us against the world. So when I b...
I look at it like this: that if Shakespeare were alive today, he would have written two or three plays about the Kennedy family, and actors would traditionally play JFK like they Hamlet or King Lear. They just would. I mean, people have played JFK, a...
I had always told my father that before working with him in the same frame as an actor, which I was petrified to do, I wanted to learn from him, so I had pleaded with him for two years before he agreed to write and direct 'Mausam.' It was our dream p...
I've always just adored music. It's my first love, really. I admire and respect people in the music business. You really have to work hard and diligently. Sometimes actors can be lazy and get away with it, but you can't do that if you're a musician.
Every night, half an hour before curtain up, the bells of St. Malachy's, the Actors' Chapel on New York's 49th Street, peal the tune of 'There's No Business Like Show Business.' If you walk the streets of the theatre district before a show and see th...
Show business always tries to stereotype you, so that is something you have to fight against no matter who you are. A lot of actors who are of a minority background complain that they only get stereotyped roles, and they are 100 percent correct. Howe...
I considered a lot of different jobs as a kid. I thought about becoming a priest or a lawyer. My father had a big linen-supply business and I considered working for him. What dawned on me was: 'If I'm an actor, I get to do the fun parts of every job!...
I come from an artistic family. My dad's an actor, my mother's an actress, my sister's an actress. So I kind of grew up in that kind of environment. Oddly enough, I never really knew about my parents' work. I've seen small clips of it, but we never a...
It's great to work with people who are jobbing actors at different stages of their career, and learning from them, and getting over being star-struck by somebody like Ian McKellen because he has such a long prestigious history in the business, but th...
Music is where I have the most creative freedom, but I love producing. To me, that's kind of where all the action is. You get a chance to have your hands in every aspect of a film. From picking a director, sometimes picking a writer, to the actors, t...
I'm sorry to bang on about it because I know everyone is, but Bryan Cranston in 'Breaking Bad' is remarkable. To see him switch from 'Malcolm in the Middle' to suddenly become Walter White is incredible. It's a) nice to see an actor given that chance...
I thought being in the wheelchair might be kind of limiting for me as an actor. It turned out cool in a lot of ways. Of course, at the end of the day, I can get up out of the chair and go home, but I'm very acutely aware that most people can't, so I ...
It's actually kind of cool that women have taken to me. Because now I have a whole different demographic when it comes to the audiences. I have women who come out and support my movies, and that is a huge demographic for me, which is great because so...
A lot of times what happens is, not even just with child actors, but people in general, is they get so caught up in the now. The hot song, the hot TV show, the hot movie. You're not saying 'OK, this is cool, but where am I trying to be 20 years from ...
You gotta understand, there weren't a whole lot of roles for Hispanics in the Eighties, so comedy was really the way I could really feed myself and eventually feed my family. I was an actor who learned to be a comic, and it's cool to come back and ge...
I started home school around sixth grade, but I'd only done a couple of national commercials. I remember I had this Spalding commercial with Paul Pierce from the Celtics, and I used to go to school, and people made fun of it. It wasn't even cool to b...
Even though I was manically overachieving and involved in everything, I still never felt like I belonged. That's definitely affected my whole life and why I wanted to become an actor and tell people stories, because communication and feeling like you...
I don't have an answer for why Hollywood still casts non-ethnic people for ethnic roles. It's something that has to change. Sometimes they'll write a character for a Native person and then say, 'Well, there's no Native actors that can capture the int...
I just try not to subscribe to the ways of celebrity. I'm not a celebrity, I'm a working actor. A lot of the events - the parties and the premieres that people go to to get noticed - I'm just not into. I'll hang out with my friends, go see punk shows...
