As an actor, particularly because I'm - I would call myself a character actor. I change my look, my physical appearance and my body, my hair color, my whatever all the time for a role.
I saw 'Six Degrees of Separation' because my brother was in it. It was a watershed experience. It was theatrical and scary, and New York functioned like a character. John Guare became a hero for me.
I become my characters, and then try to allow events in the story to take their own course. I try not to play God, but to let them work out their own destiny.
Action films are great, but an action film that has characters that are compelling and a story that people can care about is something even better. We love to see action heroes that are vulnerable, that are sensitive, that are family people, that are...
I like films to be pure cinema, but I also like them to provide a snapshot of a family, a society or a character - something that can nourish you as a human being as well as an actor.
I'll write about myself, or people I know, or archetypal characters, but the goal is to get at some truth, not to necessarily convey my own experience as an individual to the world.
Well, I go to the theater today, and its curtain - there is no curtain in this play; the lights go down and go up - and we start. And I live this character for two hours. There are only two of us in the play. And It's a complete experience.
Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, ambition inspired, and success achieved.
I get to actually experience what it would be like to be a psycho, which is not a fun one, or to be a cowboy, or to be a weird character of some sort. For me, it suits me. It suits my personality. I'm an emotional kind of person anyway.
Being 'Johnny' was almost like an out of body experience. I thought he was just a character that I'd created and could quite easily step away from, but it was much more difficult than that.
It ended up being a very good thing, because they finally started writing for the character, and I realized that you have to go to work with a purpose. I learned from the experience and then moved on.
I think there's an essential problem in movies and TV that I think a lot of people experience now: Audiences are way more interested in the actors than the characters that they're playing. It's a strange thing.
Life experience is what defines our character, even if it means getting your heart broken or being lied to. You know, you need the downs to appreciate the ups. Going on the adventure or taking that risk is important.
But the same thing was true in the army. You slept in a barracks with all kinds of people of every nationality, every trade, every character and quality you can imagine, and that was a good experience.
I really prefer the actual experience of being onstage and living the character from beginning to end with the energy of the audience. There's nothing that beats that feeling, and yet I really have trouble with the eight shows a week.
The thing about being an actor is that as we get older, there are more and more characters to explore and, in general, they get more complicated, so you get to bring all your crazy life experience to the table.
I've been very lucky in the characters I've chosen. Up until last year I was a nobody. I did jobs I booked because I needed to put food in my mouth.
I am attracted to the complexities and deeper truths of characters, and I can't name a favourite role any more than I can name a favourite food!
'Into The Wild' had a great sense of wild, unpredictable freedom that I loved, and 'Unforgiven' is just a great western with characters that walked the line between right/wrong with an ambiguity that felt very true to frontier life.
Sound character provides the power with which a person may ride the emergencies of life instead of being overwhelmed by them. Failure is... the highway to success.
For my own family, I would always choose the makeshift, surrogate family formed by various characters unrelated by blood.
