When I was in junior high, a foreign-history teacher started a theater class. So I got my feet wet there and through high school, so I was very fascinated with acting as a means of expression.
I know I have this kind of teaching element in me, but I don't want to become a 'teacher of theater' because that would formalize something that I'd much rather keep casual.
I am really not of the school of naturalism. I like style, and you can use more style in theater than in film roles. I love to sink my teeth into a part.
As I told you, from the time I was fifteen, I thought the theater was too much involved with actors trying to make the audience love them, being over emotional.
I love to go to a regular movie theater, especially when the movie is a big crowd-pleaser. It's much better watching a movie with 500 people making noise than with just a dozen.
I think theater will always be my first love. I've been doing it since I was nine, and there's nothing quite like being on stage, having the immediate intake of energy and exchange of ideas.
During a trip to Iraq last fall, I visited our theater hospital at Balad Air Force Base and witnessed these skilled medical professionals in action and met the brave soldiers whose lives they saved.
I actually got started in acting when I was in pre-school. I was really into dance and performing, so my mom had me in dance classes, and then I got involved in a local theater company.
I started acting when I was, like, three. My brother was really smart, and he wasn't being challenged enough, so my mom put him in the theater class. And I obviously followed him.
With 'Girls'... I feel like there's an impulse to try to make it look better or neater or more perfect, and when I watch theater, television, movies, it's always the imperfection I'm always more attracted to.
I was very driven in high school. I worked a bunch of odd jobs. I never partied. I never drank. I was just a theater geek who was obsessed with movies.
When the digital world is really here, movies can be disseminated from satellite direct to homes and direct to small theaters in Mongolia and northern Russia and obscure places that the market for movies is going to grow and grow and grow.
I was obsessed with romance. When I was in high school, I saw 'Doctor Zhivago' every day from the day it opened until the day it left the theater.
Quite often - a lot of the work I had done had been extensively with women. Most especially in the theater, but also quite often in the movies. That has its own delights, and maybe pitfalls too.
When I was a kid I used to go to the movies, double features in outdoor theaters, and my parents used to take us to see like, 'Cat On a Hot Tin Roof' or something like that, with Elizabeth Taylor.
We have a very wide range of content, but the brand-newest movies, what's happening with those is a $30 pay-per-view option - not from Netflix but from DirecTV and others - of movies that are in the theater.
You have to transmit to them what it's like being in the theater. And it has to come from somewhere inside you and not by being like what somebody did last year.
I feel like people want there to be this mystery between film and theater, but I just kind of went where I got jobs, you know?
In theater, you've got to be aware of your whole body because it involves stamina. It involves two-and-a-half hours and a sustained release of energy, maybe for six months.
I always had a weird thing with being the last person somewhere... like a movie theater or a classroom. I get a weird sense of anxiety.
I acted when I was a real little kid. My mother was an actress in a Miami theater company comprised of actors from Cuba like her and I was the default kid.
