There are only so many hilarious actors so when they cross-pollinate, people assume it's always the same actors and directors.
I want to try something different in Hollywood, to tell the audience I am not just an actor star - I am an actor, too.
One of the rules about being an actor or an actress is that you never diss other actors or actresses, particularly when you don't know them.
I had to learn how to become a real actor, I had to suffer and be rejected and face that 100 times just like every actor. It wasn't like someone handed it to me.
When audiences look at an action actor like myself, sometimes we are very easily stereotyped or characterized as one type. They forget that we are actors, too.
I don't have fights with actors. In absolute honesty, I've never fought with any actor ever.
I came out of the old Second City in Chicago. Chicago actors are more hard-nosed. They're tough on themselves and their fellow actors. They're self-demanding.
I'm a character actor but unlike a lot of character actors, I don't look radically different from film to film and there was a bunch of them at once.
People imagine that actors are being offered everything and you are not. So things come in and sometimes there are things that I want and can't get a meeting on, or go to a different actors.
When the major studios flourished many years ago, an actor was groomed, developed, and worked frequently at his craft. The studios really took care of their actors.
I knew I wanted to be an actor, and my mother said, 'Call Aaron Sorkin.' It seemed dubious that I'd make it as an actor by calling Jews I knew, but it worked.
Every actor you learn from, take something from everyone - big actor or not. Whether they're big movie stars or not doesn't really matter.
Actors want to act; actors want to emote. It's like the emotional equivalent of tearing your shirt off and screaming to the heavens: you want to express, and you want to be seen to be expressing.
You have to find it in the moment, and that's one of the challenges of being an actor - especially a film actor - is that you have to maintain these heightened emotions for long periods of time. There's no trick to it. You just have to do.
The '80s were a time of technical wonder in filmmaking; unfortunately, some colleges didn't integrate their film and theater departments - so you had actors who were afraid of the camera, and directors who couldn't talk to the actors.
Studios have been trying to get rid of the actor for a long time and now they can do it. They got animation. NO more actor, although for now they still have to borrow a voice or two. Anyway, I find it abhorrent.
Well, yes, as I was a rather bad actor then and I wasn't making enough money, I thought, to make enough money to not make money as an actor, I'd better do some writing.
I love working with the same actors repeatedly. That happens a lot. It's kind of inevitable, especially if you work with the same writers and directors and you start to form a company of actors. You gravitate towards each other.
I believe singing should be like being an actor. People shouldn't have any problem buying an actor being in a comedy or a drama or a horror film. That should be the same way with music.
I don't do stunts and I don't think many actors do. For an actor to say they do their own stunts I don't think is very respectful of the profession of stunt men and women.
I consciously decided not to be a 'London' actor. Those gangster movies made a lot of East End actors think they were movie stars. And I was very aware that they were going to go out of fashion.