I was into opera as a kid - I'd play 'Carmen' and sing and dance. My mom signed me up for a theater group before preschool, and I never looked back.
I got tackled once in a movie theater. I was with my mom and brother, and then suddenly I got hit from behind and sort of sprawled out on the candy counter.
The movies have a way of seeping out there over time. We don't put them in 2,000 theaters. It wouldn't work that way.
I don't know what it was, maybe the movie theaters in my immediate surrounding neighbourhood in Burbank, but I never saw what would be considered A movies.
Juilliard definitely emphasizes the theater. They don't train - at all really - for film acting. It's mostly process-oriented, pretty much for the stage.
I've directed a couple of times in the theater, but I wouldn't make a habit of it because it's too consuming.
No, I knew when I was doing theater in New York that this was what I was supposed to be doing.
I worked at the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco, lived there for three years, and lived in Baltimore for 12 years.
I believe that a large part of the training in the regional theaters is in imitation of the British style of acting. The British orientation is textual; they start from the language and work toward the character.
I did a lot of commercial and theater work when I got out of school and was living in Dallas, and I moved to Chicago to go through the Second City Conservatory Program.
I want to do work that means something to me so that when I go to work at the theater eight times a week, I want to be there.
It's that athlete's obsessiveness - the need to prove yourself and work harder than anybody else. I think it's what helped me do well in the theater.
I'm not really looking for theater work. But if somebody approaches me with enthusiasm, I might respond.
There are people who've enjoyed my work in the theater, and they let me know that it was special for them. I'm not going to say, 'Well, you should have seen me as Gandalf!'
I wish it was possible to do the work and not have to talk about it, but it is traditional in the theater to go into the village square and bang the drum and say, 'Come see this show, come see this show.'
We can guess that the unacceptable conduct of the soldiers at Abu Ghraib resulted in part from the dangerous state of affairs on the ground in a theater of war.
I mean, the whole idea of movies was it was special to go to see - you went to a movie theater to see something that was magical and amazing, in a very special location.
When I was growing up in the theater there were all these amazing girls telling me about the guy who broke their heart. And I was always wishing that it was me.
What is needed in the theater, in fact for all our art forms, is a vibrant critical tradition.
It is veneer, rouge, aestheticism, art museums, new theaters, etc. that make America impotent. The good things are football, kindness, and jazz bands.
Performance art can involve the audience with taste, smell and sounds not available with electronic media and not practical with conventional theater. This is due to the usually small audience.
