I've never been a waitress, hostess, bartender or any of the typical side jobs you'd expect an actor to have. This is partly because I've always been afraid of dropping plates on customer's heads.
'Law and Order' is completely story-driven and completely characterless, really. If you do that format for five years and you're an actor, you're bound to get bored. It wears on you. And it was really wearing on me.
I try not to have actors in mind when I write because the tendency then is to be influenced by either their last performance or your favourite of their performances.
I'm sort of one of those weird actors who whenever I do a play, I think, 'Oh, we should film this,' as opposed to have to belt it out of ourselves in a theater auditorium.
More than anything, what we do as actors is to sit and watch, and I would never want to get so lost in the celebrity bubble I couldn't do that because my feet no longer touch the ground.
I wanted to be a doctor when I was young. I also wanted to be a paramedic, but I always wanted to be an actor as well. I didn't have kids or something that I needed to provide for.
When a subject pops into a director's head, you either fit in there somewhere, or you don't. An actor is only who he is. Especially as you get older, there's not as much of a range of potentially feasible parts.
Painting and photography keep the creative channel open, and for an actor, it's to keep alive, it's to keep awake, it's to keep watching, it's to keep feeling, it's to keep enjoying, to keep that sensuality of feeling alive.
Being on stage is a seductive lifestyle. My advice to aspiring actors is think twice. People sometimes go into acting for the wrong reasons - as a shortcut to fame and fortune. If these goals are not attained, they feel a bitter disappointment.
There's something about doing theatre in London - it sinks a little bit deeper into your soul as an actor. It's something about the tradition of theatre, about performing on the West End stage.
You get the information, and it's not your job to judge it or not judge it. You adapt, and you do it. That's what we do as actors. We're just as surprised as the viewers, sometimes.
I think when your image becomes so big that it's hard for a viewer to see a character, then I think you're in danger as an actor of being unable to perform what you should be doing.
Actors, to a certain extent, never grow up, you see. It's an extension of being out in the back yard with a stick, only you're being paid to do it. It's borderline madness.
When I was a teenager, I wanted to be a rock star, not an actor. It means I can do what I want on my own terms.
We're all unique as actors. To yourself, you are unique. You have to think, 'I'm me. I'm not going to bunch myself with other people.' Agents and producers have to get you into a box to accommodate their limited imaginations.
I'm trying to get an acting gig on 'CSI' or something like that, so we'll see how that works out. I'm a singer, definitely not an actor, so I just follow directions.
I think of myself more as a character actor than that ingenue leading lady, who started out something like Michelle Pfeiffer, or Jessica Lange. I'm a bit quirkier than that.
It's true to say that I'm a budding young actor. But I'd rather get my name out there because of my acting rather than who I'm being photographed with.
Feelings are universal, and if an actor's doing his job, I think he's making people sit there, and if it's in a movie or a theatre, going 'Hmm, yeah, I know that... I know that.'
Sterling Holloway, the actor who had originally voiced Pooh, decided to retire in the mid-1980s. Disney decided that they wanted to continue this character with their 'New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh' TV series.
The characters are the result of two things-first, we elaborate them into fairly well-defined people through their dialogue, then they happen all over again, when the actor interprets them.
