When it comes to African Americans and African American actors, Hollywood has always felt that if you can make us laugh, that's fine, but we don't need to see you do a 'Schindler's List,' where there's no jokes or music or comedic through-line.
What part of people is resistant to an artist doing more than one thing? Is it somehow perceived as greedy? Anyone who has that weird volition to become an actor probably has a weird volition to do lots of other creative things - to write, to play mu...
Music is my main goal, but I'm not going to rush a record out. There are so many actors who have come out with albums these days. I don't want to do it because it's the thing to do. I want to wait until the time is right.
I want to run for the Senate from Tennessee. Not now, but when I'm 50, when music dies down a little bit. I know lots of artists and actors have those delusions of grandeur, but ever since I was a kid, it's been of interest to me.
I only worked on Men of Honor for three weeks, but I walked away with so much. Because Bob is the kind of actor who gives you the opportunity to really go there. And we really had to go there. I mean, we were both playing drunks.
My teeth are all right, but they are not American teeth, and my hair is not thick and luscious. Los Angeles is dense with beautiful people, and most of the men who are aspiring actors are 5ft 5in, so I tower above them.
I don't storyboard. I guess it dates back to my days in live television, where there was no possibility of storyboarding and everything was shot right on the spot - on the air, as we say - at the moment we were transmitting. I prefer to be open to wh...
I gotta make a living. I make no bones about that. Most actors do. But within that context, I've never not tried to make something as fresh and alive as I possibly could make it.
As an actor, if you're just sitting and staring and you don't know who you are in your own mind, it's vacant. And sometimes the camera is an X-ray machine, it can pick it up.
Let's face facts, this is visual medium, there's a very high premium put on people who are good-looking. But the minute you rely on that you get yourself in trouble. You certainly don't make a career out of that anymore as an actor.
I'm very interested in silence. And, more importantly, in what happens when people aren't talking on stage. I'm interested in letting actors play and do things between the lines. And in slowing everything down.
Earlier, I used to charge territories instead of my fees as an actor, but I realised it was better to keep the two apart. Now, I take my fees in cash, for acting, and keep the distribution thing separate.
Sometimes you do complete run-throughs of scenes, sometimes you break scenes down into little bits. It just depends on what the actors like to do. It's almost like jamming.
It's something that I think I'm going to have to fight against for most of my career, for people to take me seriously as an actor as opposed to a good-looking guy. It's not what I want to be known as.
I knew going in that being a single parent would be one of the toughest jobs I'd ever have. I'd been a talk-show host, actor, comic, and on and on, but this gig was going to be my defining moment.
Wong Kar Wai is a very intense character, very personable, and I believe in general he does not like and he would not want his actors to show their true looks and their true personality on screen.
I've always been terrified about being bored. I always think being bored is the worst thing. The only strategic decision I ever made as an actor was to try and make each job as different as possible.
I think you have to be very secure as an actor to escape yourself - to revisit someone's past, whether you're portraying another person or creating someone, and then to come back to who you are and not bring those emotions with you.
I can totally understand why people say: 'I'm going to do this T.V. series so that I can buy a flat'. But you've got to see what's of value to you as an actor.
For film and games, there is now a fantastic method of actors portraying characters which don't necessarily look like themselves. And yet you've still got the heart and soul of the performance.
The fact of the matter is that an actor, if I'm playing a performance capture role and you're playing a live action role and we're having a scene together, there's no difference in our acting processes.
