Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
When you get lucky, as I did getting to work on a series of amazing films, one of the drawbacks career-wise is that the image of you at 10 or 12 or whatever is burned into people's minds for a long time.
I'd like to explore the more abstract side of people's minds, as opposed to the usual sitcom stuff. I don't want to do the typical sitcom-type humor. I'd want to do stuff like go bowling with pineapples.
It's always crude to link Dickens back to the blacking factory where he was sent to work aged 12 when his father was imprisoned in Marshalsea Prison for bad debt, but it was obviously a huge part of him.
I'm quite jealous of my Scottish relations, in whose culture everyone, in a Jane Austen kind of way, got married very young, when you're too young to be cynical or jaded and just started having children.
All I know is for a number of years, if someone like me called police for a burglary, a mugging, or something happened to me, chances are that a photographer or reporter would turn up before a policeman.
I'm doing a new musical on Broadway, which opens in October called The Boy from Oz, where I play Peter Allen. For those of you who don't know, he became first famous in America for marrying Liza Minelli.
The first show I ever did, singing and dancing, was 'Beauty and the Beast.' I was playing Gaston. Gaston has red tights, knee high boots, and it's very physical. I had headaches every day for two months.
It's very hard not to let fame affect you because you are continually being told how good you are. After a while you begin to think there must be some truth in it because all those people can't be wrong.
If I were a teacher, I would like to teach freshman English - so I could be the Robin Williams type in Dead Poets Society. I wanna be that guy. I couldn't teach seniors because they'd be smarter than me.
Belief is everything when you're performing something. If you don't have the belief behind it, then that actually puts a shunt on the character. It's like, "Does the character believe this for a minute?"
'St. Elmo's Fire' is one of my favorite films. I like the storytelling of those teenage American films. You don't get that now. Teenage American movies are all about sick jokes, puking a lot, arse jokes.
I actually went to drama school at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music & Drama in Glasgow, so I stayed in my home town the whole time. However, I see more of my friends now than I did then. It's strange.
I have to maintain the weight. This is the second show [Aladdin] that I have done where I am not allowed to technically lose any weight. I'm supposed to be big. It's impressive to see someone of my size.
I have three older sisters who, when we were children, used to hold me down on a bad day and put make-up all over me, so I've had an aversion to it all my life and hate sitting down in the make-up chair.
Mars would seem, to me, to be the best place to focus our collective effort as a species... I think people would like to experience something sort of hopeful in terms of where we go next... as a species.
I have always been a martial arts fighter; it goes to back when I was eighteen. I was competing on the circuit, but when you're performing, you tend to pull punches because you don't want to hurt anyone.
If I had to rate myself between one and 10? If you're a gingerist and like ginger guys, I guess I'm a seven, with make-up on maybe an eight. If you're not a gingerist, I'm probably a six, six and a half.
I myself downloaded and watched 'The Wire,' 'Breaking Bad,' 'Downton Abbey,' 'Mad Men' and 'The Walking Dead' on my iPad while walking on a treadmill. I never turned a TV on once. I never inserted a DVD.
What I learned most from my father wasn't anything he said; it was just the way he behaved. He loved his work so much that, whenever he came on set, he brought that with him, and other people rose to it.
My education was doing good plays and also stinkers. When you do a stinker, you learn how to act. I like having to audition. It's nice to do rehearsals. But it's with an audience that you get to love it!
The Tambors were conservative Jews, and we attended Temple Beth Shalom at 14th Avenue and Clement Street in San Francisco. We were the only Jewish family for miles. To me, being Jewish meant 'otherness.'
Building a house is like producing a movie. There's no right way to do it but a lot of wrong ways. You have to be flexible and creative. You have to move fast, be prepared - or it quickly becomes costly.
I grew up in an apolitical household. I never left the country. When I became an adult, I started traveling and became interested in politics, and I probably talked about things in a silly, ignorant way.
When playing a role, I would feel more comfortable, as you're given a prescribed way of behaving. So, both Facebook and theatre provide contrived settings that provide the illusion of social interaction.
There's just something about youth and comedy that go together. Maybe it's that foolishness, that silliness that you can get away with when you're younger, that you can't get away with when you're older.
If at the end of the day, people look at it and say, oh, yeah, I liked his stuff, or for the most part I liked his stuff, or I've enjoyed watching some of the things he's done, that's all I can hope for.
I actually envy actors who have a persona: 'This is the way I am. This is the part I play.' And do it over and over and over. To me, that's a lot easier than trying to reinvent yourself every six months.
I was a very good baseball and football player, but my father always told me I was much more interested in how I looked playing baseball or football than in actually playing. There's great truth in that.
Christopher Walken was probably the most experienced dancing partner I've had in movies, because he has the same background as I do. He's from theatre, Broadway and off-Broadway, and we both shared that.
It's such a capricious, strange existence, basing your life on the whims of others, and basing your ebbs and flows of confidence and lack of confidence on the fact that people either choose you or don't.
It's almost like, when someone plays poker for the first time, they might be a professional poker player out of ignorance, just accidentally winning. That was how it felt in my first stand-up appearance.
Every day I've got to be thankful that I am alive, and you never know - the cliche is, I guess, you could get hit by a bus tomorrow, so you'd better be at peace with whatever you got going at the moment.
Id like to make character-based dramas. I end up writing thrillers a lot - these psychological character-based things with weird people doing horrible things to each other - coming to a theatre near you!
You know, it takes a while to get used to - it's a whole group of people with all these ideas and after you sort of navigate your way through the first few episodes it becomes collaborative and creative.
What's more vulnerable than being naked, especially when you're out in the cold on the street? I agreed to it as long as I could pick the towel, and I picked the smallest, most floral towel I could find.
I think that the Information Age is great, but there's a downside to it obviously as well, and it's that false information can be perpetuated so quickly. And it's sad that so many people will believe it.
A movie can and should have some real dissonance throughout - rage, heartache, tears, conflict, catharsis and all the other elements Aristotle demanded of a good story - but the chord has to be resolved.
An obsessive attention to the news, I've realized, only serves to paint a picture of the world as a throbbing blob of dysfunction, most news falling somewhere on a scale from disappointing to calamitous.
Mandela was true to himself, to his people and his principles. He sacrificed everything because he was prepared to be true to his ideals. You can relate to him whether you come from Manchester or Soweto.
I love doing voiceover work. I started doing voiceover work when I had just dropped out of school, and the first few professional jobs I got were plays, but then I started making money doing voice-overs.
Sometimes when you make a film you can go away for three months and then come back and live your life. But this struck a much deeper chord. I don't have the ability yet to speak about it in an objective.
When you're a child, the most important thing is to be able to live a life of comfort. You want to be sure that the moon goes up at night and the sun comes up in the morning and dad comes home from work.
I think one of the most pervasive evils in this world is greed and acquiring money for money's sake. Once you have six houses and a plane, it's just about a number. It's never been anything I understood.
I try to show compassion to people I come into contact with and try to put good out, as much good as I can. But that's my life; that's not my work. With my work, my job is to walk in another man's shoes.
To me, the struggle is to try to make a less-well-written or less-well-rounded character and find who they are. If you really get it, and it's all on the page, then it's really just gonna pop out at you.
On 'Think Like a Man,' they got the best out of me because they allowed me to bring my own cadences and opinions to the character that I was playing. I think we got the best of that particular character.
As soon as we try to write the simplest sentence about God, we find ourselves in anxious perplexities, but when we stop trying to write about God and talk with God, God is there and we can talk with God.
On losing the opportunity to star in Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman 'You know what? It happened for the right reason. Although I would have made a good Clark Kent. I look better in glasses.
I'm not interested in more money for the sake of it. You're aware that if you're nicking all the budget, somebody else is getting threepence ha'penny, or the production values aren't going to be so high.
I have a man cave somewhere in California - a totally undisclosed location where manly things occur. There are motorcycles, there are secret doors and passageways. Women are welcome, but they must knock.