I was fortunate as a young actor, to go straight to the RSC, where I learned that being an actor can bring with it wonderful responsibilities.
I think that most actors, and they're a very strange lot actors, very strange people, but I think that they attempt to keep in touch with the child.
Actors really are superstitious. You can always spot a group of actors at a restaurant. They're the ones spitting on their knuckles and hurling salt everywhere.
There are a handful of actors who sustain interest because it's exciting to watch them get better at what they do. I want to be one of those actors.
They call David O. Russell the actor whisperer because he can get stuff out of actors that maybe some other directors can't.
I like working with kid actors because they surprise you constantly. I mean, all actors do - but kids particularly.
I don't think of myself as a New York actor; I think about this guy who's an actor who happens to be from New York.
I also sort of find the idea that not only do actors want to please when they're onstage, I find actors really want to please off stage a lot of the time, don't they?
I'm an international actor, but at the same time, I'm also a Bollywood actor, even though most of my career has been abroad. However, I've always kept in touch with Hindi cinema.
It's such a luxury as an actor to think of your career as something you're choosing for yourself, because so much of the time as an actor you're just hoping that exciting projects come your way.
They were looking for actors - real actors - who could play instruments. There was a lot of improvisation and scene work involved in addition to the music. The auditions went on for a long time.
Being exposed to the diversity of music I was as a kid made me the actor I am today. As an actor, you have to adapt and do so many different things.
In theatre, there's the director, the writer, and below them the actor. In film, it's the actors who are most important. That goes against the grain for me.
I started off as an actor thinking that I would be this Romeo, this dashing leading man. It turns out that I'm a character actor.
I'm a character actor - always have been, always will be - and historically, character actors don't come into their own until later in their professional and chronological lives.
I couldn't be a director because I couldn't put up with the actors. I don't have the patience. Why, I'd probably kill the actors. Not to mention some of the beautiful actresses.
I don't like it when people ask actors to work for free - on the fringe - as if it's some kind of virtue. That annoys me - actors should be paid well.
In terms of animation, animators are actors as well. They are fantastic actors. They have to draw from how they feel emotionally about the beat of a scene that they're working on. They work collaboratively.
When I got to the reading all the work, I was reduced to being an actor in an experimental play that I'd already written. And I didn't want to be an actor.
Paul and I were both struggling actors. One night he would serve me in a restaurant, and the next night I would serve him. It was what out of work actors did.
I was trained to serve the writer and director as an actor before I serve myself. Not to say that's gotten in my way, but that's a different way of working than most American actors work.
