Acting is a win-win situation. There is no risk involved. That's why I get tired of hearing actors who try to make out that there's a downside to it. Fame is an odd thing. It bugs you a little bit, but it's really not bad.
Well, I think any actor can probably identify with being a professional liar. You don't always look at yourself that way, but I know a lot of days I do.
I'll betide thee, say I, and may the Gods, or at least the Athenians, confound thee for a vile citizen and a vile third-rate actor! Read the evidence.
There is only so much you can do if you're pulling weight and there's nobody there to play off of. You can't have those beautiful moments with new actors who are so worried about everything else but the moment.
As a young actor, I played a lot of 'exotic' parts and was stuck with the tag 'sultry.' I had to refuse such parts if I were ever to play anything else. It did the trick, but my agent feared it made me harder to cast.
Since it was too difficult to get into the Screen Actor's Guild in New York, I moved to Miami in 1982 and started a successful career as a television commercial actress, obtaining my SAG card there.
I think Chicago people are very special people, and the Midwest's confluence of East Coast-meets-Midwest sensibilities had to, on a formative level, inform me as an artist and an actor. In that sense, it had to have helped me.
Ross Hunter was my assistant on Take Me to Town, He was a young man, an actor before that, and learned a lot on the picture. During shooting, Goldstein left, and Ross was most pleasant. He never interfered.
I must say, I am a 10,000-times better director because I am in therapy. I'm serious. I can understand more the actors. I can manipulate them more easily.
A lot of people don't realize, when you are acting in a martial arts film, you're not just performing martial arts. You're not just performing martial arts. You're actually acting as much as any other actor.
You know, OJ was a really nice guy, and he knew his lines. He was nice to everybody on the set. He got to be a better actor, I thought, with every movie.
It's like an athlete. He has a string of hot years, and then he fades into nothingness. The actor doesn't necessarily fade into nothingness. After his hot years, he fades into a different category.
Even though momentarily I thought about being a doctor, I was always involved in theatre and did a drama degree. I just didn't have the guts to go, 'Yes, I'm going to be an actor,' until I was probably 21.
Living in London as a student is tough. And my heart goes out to every single drama student in London because, as an actor, it's a creative process that you are taking on, and if you don't get to do it every day, it hurts.
I was very new to working in front of the camera when I started shooting 'Gatsby', so I set myself the mission of gleaning as much information as possible out of the much more experienced actors. The cast was astoundingly talented.
When you throw punches at actors, you stop, you pull it, and it looks like you pulled it. When you throw punches at cartoon characters, they are not there, so you can swing through. It looks like you really decked them.
I feel very, very grateful. I'm a lucky guy, you need a lot of luck, and then when the cameras roll, you have to have this group of writers, directors, and actors that just gel, and it seems to literally be happening more and more.
I think when people talk about lighter drama, they tend to use that term, not derogatorily, but 'lighter' means sort of less to a degree, but if you're an actor, light drama is often mistaken for easier drama.
For me as an actor, you always sort of want to bring yourself to a character in some way. You want to find a way to approach something in a way that's real and interesting, and also so there's some empathy there.
When you're working on a film, it's not theater; you don't have a few weeks of rehearsal. A lot of times you are showing up on set, and you've never been to the place; you've never met the other actors you're working with.
My theory is that everything an actor does, from the way he looks at his watch to the way he moves across the stage, is in the service of advancing a story, and in that sense, it's all writing. In that sense we, while acting, write.
