What's really interesting about actors, is that we all have opinions on how people's careers look, but I think you never have any idea of your own, or what other people think of you.
If you're an English actor and turn up in America, they don't have an opinion about where you sit. They have no idea what auditions to send you to, so they send you to everything.
I don't think an actor ever wants to establish an image. That certainly hurt me, and yet that is also what made me successful and eventually able to do more challenging roles.
As a child, I always liked dressing up and getting into character, and actors are lucky in being able to retain that playfulness, though we do seem to find it hard to grow up.
When a doctor is performing an operation, his mind cannot be somewhere else. And it's the same with actors. You have to commit yourself mind, body and soul to a project in order to do justice to it.
As an actor, it's fun to play guys who aren't just locked into a male pattern, but a lot of guys you're asked to play are fairly macho and have a certain rigid standard they're living by.
Trying different things is very important to me. I see people and want to wear their clothes and drive in their cars for awhile. That's probably one reason I became an actor.
The instinct to impersonate produces the actor; the desire to provide pleasure by impersonations produces the playwright; the desire to provide this pleasure with adequate characterization and dialogue memorable in itself produces dramatic literature...
Acting is something different to everybody. I just know that if you watch an actor or actress getting better and better, I think that's them just understanding themselves better and better.
My face lends itself to austere characters, and unless they're two-dimensional, I will do them. Any actor will tell you that an interesting villain is much more interesting to play.
My first offer was when I was 12, and it was for a soap opera. And I turned it down because I knew that I was an unformed actor, and I didn't want to develop bad habits.
I care more about telly because it made me an actor and there's a much more immediate response to TV. You can address the political or cultural fabric of your country.
There's no real excuse for being successful enough as an actor to do what you want and then selling out. You do it pure. You don't try to adapt it, make it commercial.
Actors know, with me they aren't going to be allowed to rehearse a scene for a couple of hours and then get away with doing 25 takes before we get it right. So they come with their full bag of tricks.
I don't storyboard, and I don't really shot list. I let the shots be determined by how the actors and I figure out the blocking in a scene, and then from there, we cover it.
On 'Sin Nombre,' Adriano Goldman and I improvised a lot of things on-site. We were working with untrained actors, and you can't really block a scene in a traditional way.
I need theatre for my equilibrium, because in theatre the actors don't care so much about image, about celebrity - you are more independent. There is not the narcissism, maybe, that you find in cinema.
I like to look at scenarios and see how people interact with each other. That's why I'm an actor because I try to recreate that. Since our daughter joined us the spectrum has widened.
As an actor, you pay attention very closely to everything that happens to you, and you're constantly watching others as well, trying to just find out where everything comes from.
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.
