Living in France while the Falklands War was going on, I felt a profound sense of shame and betrayal, just as I did by the war in Iraq. People have asked why I don't talk about that directly in my plays. Well, politics needs to be articulated in many...
One day, out of irritation, I said, you know all of those years with the Royal Shakespeare Company, all those years of playing kings and princes and speaking black verse, and bestriding the landscape of England was nothing but a preparation for sitti...
No one realized that I needed eyeglasses until I was 12 years old. My parents were writers, so I was around the sounds of words and developed a vocabulary with my sense of hearing. I play guitar by ear.
I think the Internet is an awful lot like FM radio was when it broke out in the late '60s. It's kind of a wild and wily kind of format. They could play 20 songs in a row that had the word 'blue' in them, or whatever they wanted to do.
I had a lot of friends who were boys. I played ball with them, but we didn't date. They didn't ask me that much because I wasn't cute enough or because I didn't drink or party.
Actors only have our bodies, voices, and the text. So I think actors need to have a fit and in-tune body. I was always very disciplined in wanting to have that. That's one of my favorite things - playing a role with a physical requirement.
We don't need more of the same, typical politicians fighting for themselves and for special interests. We need someone to believe in our small-business owners again and someone to champion those folks who play by the rules.
If you record the sound of bacon in a frying pan and play it back, it sounds like the pops and cracks on an old 33 1/3 recording. Almost exactly like that. You could substitute it for that sound.
I see a film or a TV series or a play as being this machine. It sounds quite robotic, in its description, but it's basically a machine and you're just one of the cogs that goes in it. You're not the biggest one, and you're not the smallest one. Every...
It's exciting to do something like this because usually what happens in theater is that, after the first or second reading of a play, it falls apart completely and the rehearsal process is such that you begin to pick up the pieces and put it back tog...
A good strategy and solid play doesn't revolve around tricks. It doesn't revolve around surprises. It doesn't revolve around having hidden information. It revolves around very solid strong timing, and crisp execution.
As with Cesc Fabregas, some players who go and play for foreign clubs improve on a cultural level. It makes them grow on many levels; intellectually, because you have to learn a new language and adapt to another culture, and on a footballing level to...
I'm a big, big blues fan and the last several years I've really invested in the blues a lot, and I think my playing is getting better because of it - not necessarily better on a technical level, but certainly on a level of appropriateness.
I don't think a lot of actors talk about it, but there's usually a process where you essentially purge yourself of the character that you played prior to the movie. That's the first thing. You want to do it.
I wasn't completely comfortable in the footy culture because I wasn't that comfortable in my own skin, which I am now. I'd fit in better now, but I don't miss the training and the injuries you get playing footy.
That's the thing with sci-fi and action roles. You have to play the danger as real. If you don't, you end up with egg on your face. You have to commit. You can't think about how stupid it might look without the special effects.
I did a smaller gig with an acoustic guitar and a drum machine. In one song, something wrong happened with the drum machine. I tried to cover up the mistake by playing faster and improvising a new song but it became crazy, and I had to admit it was a...
We have been playing to a 70-30 black to white audience. And we are just doing what should come next, trying to attract a larger house, trying to reach an audience that's half black and white.
Molly Shannon and I used to always talk about that we really felt strongly that we were comedic actors, that we weren't comedians. You just played things real and the comedy came out of the context.
All of the punk-rock bands of the era would come in and play, and my job on Punk Rock Night was that I would go into the slam pit, and... I was 24 or 25, and I'd slam dance in the pit.
I'm not crazy about arenas just because I can sell them out. It doesn't do anything for my ego at all. I want to play places where people don't have to sit in the nosebleed seats and wonder what the hell is going on.
