The general view is that actors start on soaps and then maybe graduate to prime-time television or film; normally you don't see a film actor going to do a soap.
If you come up to me in the street, I am going to be delighted to meet you. I became a television star to entertain people, to spread goodness into the world.
Coming off of 'Book of Mormon,' I had a lot of opportunities. I didn't want to do TV, actually. I really wanted to get paid nothing and keep doing theater at all costs.
There was a little afternoon show that was called Afternoon. Back in those days in television, most local stations had a midday show for housewives that had a series of things. It was like a variety show for midday.
When The Muppet Show ended, we all sat around and said, what kind of television show would we like to do. We felt the need these days are for some quality children's programming.
How my film career happened, I don't know. It was unplanned. I'd been in films and TV throughout the Sixties and early Seventies, but it was really 'The Naked Civil Servant' in 1975 that put me on the radar.
The one thing the blues don't get is the backing and pushing of TV and radio like a lot of this garbage you hears. They choke stuff down people's throat so they got no choice but to listen to it.
Politics is there the way men and women are there, the way the Atlantic Ocean is there. Sometimes I've written about politics specifically, I mean about politics as it's understood on television and in newspapers.
When I started out in comedy, it was common knowledge that it took about 10 years to get good. And that was okay because it took you about 9 years to get on television.
Television has certain imperatives that CNN had the luxury of ignoring for a long period of time. CNN could take the position that the news would be the star, because in most of the programming day, they were the only all-news operation on the air.
I have real TV studios. If I have an idea, I can go shoot it. I can experiment. If I choose to air it or not, it's at my discretion. I don't have to do it to somebody else's time frame.
Everyone talks about reality TV and that there are no roles left. That's false. Years ago, there were three networks. Now there are 20 cable networks and so many ways for films to be exhibited. It's an exciting time for actors, writers, directors, an...
In theater, you're allowed to take your time and sit in a role for a month before you have to share it with anybody. In film and TV, you have to just kind of show up and be ready to do that, which, to me, is very strange and crazy.
In a film you only get two hours to do this big arc and so you have to pick and choose your moments carefully, but with television you get to take your time and just take it episode by episode and discover new things.
We did not have a television while I was growing up, and so I read voraciously. My earliest memory of being utterly transfixed by a book was Madeleine L'Engle's 'A Wrinkle in Time.'
I didn't come from a background where I saw a lot of loving couples. All my aunts and uncles were either split up or fighting all the time. The only healthy relationships I saw were on TV.
If you take the '70s with Blaxploitation pictures, there was a proliferation of black-content films and motion pictures, television, stage plays and so forth at a time when Hollywood was in trouble financially, and it was cheaper to do black films to...
I coauthored my first nonfiction book by the time I was 25. I have been involved in nonfiction documentaries, newspapers, TV and internet since that time.
Having done film, TV and theatre, the nicest final bit of the jigsaw is to do live comedy, because you can talk to the audience. It feels really natural to be able to laugh with them, but at the same time still be within the framework of a play.
How do you do something where you're able to be specific and edgy enough to compete with what the cable networks are doing and, at the same time, appeal to a broader audience? That's the line that everyone in network television is trying to tread.
When I'm on TV, I'm often talking to a conservative host. I may have another conservative arguing with me. You've got very limited time, and you're using 'sound-bite' type language.
