Chris O'Dowd is a very special talent. He's one of those very, very rare actors who can be the clown, or he can be the straight man playing off the clown, in a scene.
When it comes to casting, I've been so lucky. I've worked with unbelievable actors who make me look better than I am and take the written word and make it honest.
One of the reasons people find me a believable actor is that I don't seem like one of the gods from Olympus. I seem like someone who was lucky enough to be let into Olympus.
I like to be in the now, now. Sometimes musicians have to wait for me to be genuine with it. As an actor, I don't have that luxury. You have to make it legit when they say 'action.'
This whole thing about winning and losing is muddy waters. But I can remember, as a young actor, just walking around this city and not being able to get arrested.
Everyone said that if you want to be a real actor, go to New York. If you want to sell out, go to LA. And I thought - I want to sell out!
I'm kind of in a middle space, being marketed as a biracial actor. Roles are written either stereotypically black, or they're written 'normal,' which is just code for white.
I certainly have never been an actor who can play the Everyman guy - or, I don't tend to get those parts. I've tended to play eccentrics. I've played a lot of villains, of course.
It's hard for me to listen to any actors whine or moan about anything acting-related because look at the world. We really have nothing to complain about. Just to be working is a blessing.
My mother is a pastor. I think she has her moments where she's like, 'Dani, what are you getting into,' but at the end of the day, she really supports me as an actor.
Actors want to impress at the beginning, so you take advantage of that by suddenly saying, 'Right, you're here for two weeks.' What you're doing is creating a siege mentality.
Actors are hard to photograph because they never want to reveal who they are. You don't know if you're getting a character from a Chekhov play or a Polanski film. It depends what mood they're in.
In many ways I wish I wasn't an actor dragging around the baggage from being one so that I could just devote my energies to encouraging people to find their true selves.
No not pigeon holed me as an actor, or as a character, or as to what I could do - but what I would do... and the fact is the things you don't do are almost as important as as the things that you do.
It's the weirdest thing. When you go into acting, you expect to be a huge star and to be recognized... It did happen, but not in the way you expect it to... In L.A., I'm just another character actor.
I went from a guy, kind of a working actor, a supporting player, to magazine covers and being offered the studio pictures really quickly. Nobody was comfortable with it. I wasn't really comfortable with it.
Running my show is really like an actor being in repertory but where, in one day in one performance, you do scenes from a drama, a farce, a low comedy and a tragedy.
As actors, we're all encouraged to feel that each job is the last job. They plant some little electrode in your head at an early stage and you think, 'Be grateful, be grateful, be grateful.'
For hundreds of years, that was the major form of entertainment: The grown-ups sat around and watched the kids play. Now they sit around and watch the television. The actors are the kids.
If we take as given that critical infrastructures are vulnerable to a cyber terrorist attack, then the question becomes whether there are actors with the capability and motivation to carry out such an operation.
Well, I think on second units it's all about execution. Because you come in there, you don't have to worry so much about the studio and all the other actors and all that.
