To practice your scales, so to speak, in order play the symphony, is what you have to do as a young poet.
Well, it's like my movie, 'The Apostle.' Some people in the North don't get that movie. They think that, in the South, if you don't shout, you can't play one of those guys.
Eclecticism is the word. Like a jazz musician who creates his own style out of the styles around him, I play by ear.
Every character I've ever played, I always try to take him right to the edge and not allow him to fall over, but directors have a tendency to pull me back a little bit.
All the dialogue on tape, and we'd play the tape in performance. Then I thought it'd be interesting if the actor's repeated what they heard on the tape, but at a slower speed, so we'd get a web of language.
So, you can set up an orchestra down this end of the railway station playing one particular area, and simultaneously at the other end something completely different going on. And in the middle they meet, or not, depending.
In Tasmania, an island the size of Ireland whose primeval forests astonished 19th-century Europeans, an incomprehensible ecological tragedy is being played out.
I just have my own taste, and I just try and stick with that. I'm just trying to play as many characters as I can for as long as I have an opportunity to.
During my theatre days, I was more comfortable doing comedy. It's such an irony. I have always played a buffoon on stage, and yet I don't have any comic role to my credit.
Most often I am only interested in an idea if it's going to get hundreds of millions of users. That's the scale that I am always trying to play to.
I have to play baseball to make me happy. I have to be an athlete. But when it's all said and done, I'll be a normal father. A normal-type house man.
Genius is not a possession of the limited few, but exists in some degree in everyone. Where there is natural growth, a full and free play of faculties, genius will manifest itself.
Olivia Newton-John was our first choice to play Sandy, but she was nervous about acting, whether she would feel comfortable with us and could pull it off at all.
As a kid growing up in the back streets of Dublin I used to pretend I was playing in the World Cup with my mates out on the streets, and now I will be doing it for real.
I always felt, as a listener at a show, that when there was too much banter between the artist and the audience that it detracted from the show. I more enjoyed shows where the guys came out and they just played.
'Deadwood' was just a wonderful opportunity for me. Outside of my own things that I've written, I hadn't had the opportunity to play a character with that amount of depth and range.
No one will ever argue that someone could have played Helen Keller better than Patty Duke. It was an incredibly demanding role and I don't think anyone can argue that it was a false performance.
It is strange how your understanding of a play changes. It normally happens after a performance and you suddenly think, 'So that's what that line really means' - it's like a light going on.
Real estate is the best investment on earth, however, when the music stops playing, which happens occasionally, don't be the one left without a chair.
Especially when you play a character for so many years, the character ends up reflecting a lot of who you are and I think I've changed a lot since then, but that represented a lot of who I was as a teenager.
Movement is very important to a character, no matter what period you're working in. So when it came to playing Emma Jung and lacing up in the corset, it was really not a foreign thing for me.
