I want to do primarily film and theater; I always want to do a play because it feeds my soul. It's like an exercise on stage.
The hardest thing in the world to do is to have someone in a seat in a theater laughing so hard that they're making weird sounds.
I attend surprisingly few shows. The type of theater that is popular today just doesn't appeal to me.
After graduating, the jobs that I got were TV, so you sort of move to where the jobs are. But I would absolutely go back to theater if the role was right.
I studied for three years in the theater, and it was a very, very scary experience to direct live, being so vulnerable without the possibility to control things, to be so exposed.
The problem was to sustain at any cost the feeling you had in the theater that you were watching a real person, yes, but an intense condensation of his experience, not simply a realistic series of episodes.
When I work in the theater, you know you'll get this almost devotional, religious experience where you're breaking bread with everyone every day.
The visceral experience of seeing a movie in three dimensions, coming at you in the theater, is obviously here to stay, because it is a unique experience. I think that kind of format is only appropriate for some genres, but I'm all for it.
You have to think about why you're asking an audience to come to the theater. It's not that they should come because it's good for them, because it's the vegetables that they should eat and the culture shot that they should get... It's about experien...
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.
You will see a 3-D movie in a movie theater for the shared experience of it - or for a date, and so on. You don't all sit at home getting your entertainment in a vacuum.
There's a positive side to film and television, the sense of feeding into the theater... Your fans will follow you, hopefully, and be open-minded to see you play other things and experience other stories you want to tell.
My limited theater experience was when I was a kid starting out: two or three plays. I was good in one and mediocre in the other. My problem is that I have other interests.
If you love acting and you've ever experienced theater, then you know that in a movie it's almost impossible to live out that experience, unless you're a Pacino or a De Niro or somebody who gets to pick their parts.
What I always loved about theater is that that's an experience that a company of actors just sinks itself into for weeks, and you really get to work on the material, and by the time you're in front of an audience, you really own it.
I love bad movies, whereas going to the theater for me is a painful experience. I think it's really hard to sit and watch actors do something live and have it not go well.
The very first things that I did, even in theater, were bad guys. They are meaty roles for the most part. With the bad guy you have more freedom to experiment and go further out than with a good guy.
I came from a family where I felt great pressure to be financially successful, and I felt that staying in Chicago and doing theater, I was, in all likelihood, not going to find financial success.
I always believed I was an ugly duckling in a family of swans, you know? I was such a black sheep, and it was the same way in high school... I was just kind of that awkward theater kid with a bunch of athletes... it was very 'Glee.'
These days, you can do a TV series for five years and all of a sudden be on top of the business. Features don't even run in theaters very long anymore before going right to television.
I can go to a movie theater and watch a movie I was in with an audience... but with television, the opportunity to meet the fans at Comic Con or any other situation, it's a chance to enter that circle; it's that sharing.
