He's very alive in a scene. He's a very good actor to act with. Even though through most of the picture he's blind, there are many places early in the picture I got to be with him before he was blind. Like convincing him in the office to do the pictu...
Films were never in my budget. Didn't occur to me till much later. I hoped for a long, good life, which I've had and I'm having as an actor. I didn't expect the rest.
I'm one of those fortunate actors who gets to work pretty much every day. I've had a run of good fortune and work with some terrific people who have hired me.
You just worry that your time is up. It's not that people suddenly go, 'Oh, actually they're not very good any more,' but sometimes, well, your time is up. There are a lot of actors out there who just disappear.
If I know a guy who's a really good improvisational actor, I'd be foolish not to let him because he'll come up with goodies and all kinds of little freebies that you get.
It's never going to get better than working opposite an actor like Jeff Bridges. That's as good as it gets. I don't even know what to refer to him as. He's just a great guy. He's iconic on his own merits.
There is an established tradition of actors directing films that have a particular, personal meaning for them - Warren Beatty, Clint Eastwood, Kevin Costner, and most recently George Clooney to name a few. Remarkably, their films share an unusually h...
The prosthetics were interesting because the artist was so good that they could just put a Hitchcock mask on me, but you don't want to do that. You're an actor playing Hitchcock, so it's about how much of that you're going to do.
There are things that I would avoid, so I have the choice to say no, when I feel I'm repeating myself too much. But then there could be a reason to do that with a good director. So I think actors have to have a loose philosophy.
I've been lucky to learn by playing all kinds of roles and watching all kinds of really good cinematographers, actors, and directors for many years before people were even aware of me in terms of audience.
I worked in script development, many years ago, and read a lot of scripts. Between that and the scripts I've read as an actor, and I'm a writer as well, I think I have a pretty good sense about whether the bones of a story are there and whether the s...
Only a fool does not fear actors, but you can't beat them, and if you can't beat them, join them, as they say. As I've got older I've become very interested in that part of the work.
It turns out that I've become a pretty good werewolf actor. I'm going to have to try to get myself into a different position, at some point in the future, but I'll take werewolf. Werewolf is pretty damn fun to play.
I try not to live in the future too much; that can make you crazy as an actor. There are so many people who are obsessed about their career path, like it's something which you can control, which fundamentally you can't.
I want to be a little more dramatic nowadays. I definitely want something big and funny, but I look for things that can just have people see me in a different light and let me mature as both an entertainer and an actor and a comedian.
I'm known as a kind of dramatic, serious, almost humorless actor and the fact is, I'm a funny guy, and I spend most of my life trying to find a lighter side of things, and on stage was given plenty of opportunity to do that.
I got to draw monsters, robots and write funny stories. I loved doing that stuff and working with the actors. But it got to be less and less that stuff and more about trying to be everywhere and not being able to do one thing very enjoyably.
It's funny in the U.K., where I'm not really known because I never did a soap. My English cousins in the Lake District think I'm not a real actor because they've never seen me in 'Home and Away' or 'Neighbours.'
I always find it funny when I watch actors talking about, 'I chose to do this part.' A lot of times it's 'you're lucky to get the job.' We're like, 'Thank you so much.'
It's funny, because I was trained as a dramatic actor at New York's Colonnades Theater Lab in the '70s, along with Jeff Goldblum, Danny DeVito and Rhea Perlman. People I worked with there saw a comedian in me. I'm still most at home in comedy.
It's funny what actors take issue with. Some won't do parts where animals are in jeopardy; some won't ever play anyone remotely unlikable - 'Heroes only, please.' Some won't do violence. I have no such qualms.
