Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Growing up, I think I always had a sense of art: a sense that there was poetry in the world. I didn't know where I was going to find it. I didn't know where I was going to fit in, that was for sure. But I kept moving forward. There wasn't a future in anything other than movement.
In those days, reserve duty lasted for six years, which, I might add, was three times as long as service in the regular army, although to be perfectly honest, I was unable to fulfill my entire obligation because I was taking acting classes and they said I could skip my last year.
You know, you learned that very young in American culture that the feminine boys don't do well. And yet, I had a dad who was a lieutenant colonel in the army. My dad was a man's man, but he still adored me. And somehow in the midst of that, I still grew up hating the sissy in me.
I started out with a business and psychology major, and then I started doing plays and concentrating more and more on theater. I dropped out of college and moved to New York and studied theater at The Neighborhood Playhouse. I did that for a couple of years and then got an agent.
On Broadway and in the United States it's very different - people crossover all the time into television. I think that we'll get there [in London] in the end, but it has to start with who comes to see you in the musical and whether they can see beyond the dancing and the singing.
If you're doing things that you don't want to be doing or you're working with people who aren't making you better and you're not learning, if things aren't challenging you, you could be wasting your time. You might be making some money, but you might not be improving as an actor.
Theres a lot of speculation on what the zombie apocalypse thing means. I have a feeling that its kind of an expression of our subconscious fears. I think we know that something big and impossible - some enormous crash, equalizing crash, whatever - may be coming around the corner.
It's a fascinating job, to come in and be the most interesting person in an episode. Whoever the guest star is, that's the job - to maintain the interest and the focus for that 42 minutes or whatever, and it should be a huge relief to those people that are the leads in the shows.
There's a certain level of comfort that comes when you move in together. The mystery is gone. She starts dressing for bed in your pajamas, cream on her face, Uggs, curlers. What happened to the sexy girl that used to come to bed in lingerie? The girl says, 'We don't need to act.'
I took movement classes that I wore my double-breasted suits to. I worked on my elocution because people spoke differently then. I was really trying to toe the line. I think that if I had spoken exactly the way that people spoke back then, it probably would have alienated people.
Initially, I had started doing theater, where the actor has a direct relationship to the audience. So, moving into film and television disconnected me. When you do a film, you start to get the character, and then it disappears for a year before it's released and you get feedback.
I really cite Walt Disney as teaching me everything I know. It sounds crazy, but I'm serious! In 'Bambi,' the mother dies, but you don't see the corpse. You see the father, the stag, come up and you see 'Bambi' alone, and that has so much more impact than seeing a mutilated deer.
I love the movie 'Taken,' but the dialogue in the beginning of that movie is hilarious. They're talking, these commando types, and there's dialogue like, 'Hopefully your daughter appreciates what you're doing for her. Does she know that you're doing it?' What guys talk like this?
I reached a point where I didn't think I was that great. I'm not being humble. I was looking at things and thinking: 'You're not really good in that'. I think I was becoming boring as well as bored. It was nobody's fault except mine - probably - and it might not even be my fault.
Westerns were always my favorite things when I was little. And it always bothered me when cowboys were too clean in movies, or when they wore their guns like they had an outfit on. It always worked better when a guy looked sweaty and smelly; I hadda believe, I hadda believe that.
It sounds so weird, but I'm totally pro-aging. If you look at the film industry, it's so funny how it's so much more accepted that actors begin their prime in their forties or fifties, and for women, it's so different. I think it's time to change that. Aging is a beautiful thing.
As for facial hair, I think I decided it was a good look after graduate school. I always shave it myself and trim my own beard. I change the look depending on the role. For 'Million Dollar Baby,' I had no facial hair. For 'Men in Black 3,' I had no facial hair but did wear a wig.
It's important to run not on the fast track, but on your track. Pretend that you have only six months to live, and make three lists: the things you have to do, want to do, and neither have to do nor want to do. Then, for the rest of your life, forget everything on the third list.
Every bad joke, every endorsement deal, all of the things that a typical host would normally get creamed for, people don't mind, because they know I don't cheat when it comes to the work I actually try. I'm a lab rat. I'm a perpetual apprentice. The joke is on me if there is one.
There are loads of kids out there who haven't got a clue what 'Men Behaving Badly' was; it was such a long time ago. So I'm able to spread my wings a little bit more. I was able to do it on stage over the years. Most directors and producers don't know who I am these days, anyway!
Thankfully, the meat of the Tony telecast is the performances from the shows, so the awards show kind of creates itself around the season, and then I fill in based on the vibe of the season in general. I'm happy that there'll be so many legitimately good performances on the show.
I like playing these awkward moments in between that build relationships. I don’t ever want to play that character that grabs the girl and has my way with her. That’s just not who that character is. If Daryl falls in love with you, he’s going to love you for the rest of his life.
Our morality is based on so many factors: of where we were born, who we were born to, what values were instilled in us, what values we chose, the way that our lives have shaped us. That dictates so much of what we assume is our morality, and also the culture, all of these things.
My dad was a journalist. One great trip we took was to Israel. We went there and drove through the whole country, and it was pretty incredible. We went to the Philippines and saw the beauty of that country but also what poverty really looks like. That had a profound effect on me.
The more suits I owned, the more I realized the best besuited look a man can achieve comes from a harmony of three details: fabric, construction, and fit. If the suit fits you like a glove and it's well made, you simply feel better about everything in life when you're wearing it.
It's kind of like those little electric bumper cars where you drive around and see if you can hit the other guy. That's exactly what the country is like now. You no longer have the sense of community. Of loyalty. It's lost its sense of group. It has nothing to do with leadership.
I wanted to dismantle the bollocks that there's a military structure to a gang, with a leader, second leader, the good looking one, first babe, second babe. It's far more arbitrary than that and their values shouldn't be romanticised. They aren't something you want to sign up to.
'Blasto' is a new game for Sony Playstation. It's an awesome three-dimensional game, and I play the character Blasto who's sort of a Flash Gordon barrel-chested superhero who goes to Uranus and shoots these little green alien Fascist guys. He rescues babes; he goes on wild rides.
Many people think that hunger is unavoidable in any society, even a society that is blessed with great abundance. That is not true. The European community does not have widespread hunger. America, which leads the world in so many ways, can end childhood hunger within its borders.
I went to the Guilford School of Music and Drama, which was affiliated with the Royal Shakespeare Company. I was lucky enough to be taught by a beautiful, wonderful teacher called Patsy Rodenberg, who works a lot with the Royal Shakespeare Company as a voice coach and technician.
Ben Kingsley was my ideal choice for Gandhi, and he really lived up to the expectations of an international audience. I did not find any Indian actor worthy to perform the role of Gandhi in the early Eighties, though there were brilliant performers like Naseeruddin Shah in India.
Despite all the wonderful advances that have been made, it's still dangerous for an actor to talk about that in our extremely misguided culture. Look at what happened in California with Proposition 8. Please, don't pretend that we're suddenly all wonderfully, blissfully accepted.
I find that you can use an acting technique when the thing isn't working, not that you make the technique the end result of your work. You use the technique when you're in trouble and things aren't flowing the way they should. It's a way of fooling yourself to make it work again.
I'm a single parent, and I just found that it was too difficult to manage raising my kids and doing the traveling involved in making movies. So I took a little bit of a break. And the little bit of a break turned into a longer break, and then I found that I really didn't miss it.
With moderate physical training, you can control anything in your body. You don't have to be an athlete to do it, and this isn't just about people with disabilities - it's about everyone. You just have to have the willpower, the mindset, and the desire to want to better yourself.
A lot of people don't want to hire disabled actors. They think you're going to take twice as long over a shot, or they don't want have to put up a ramp for disabled access. They think, 'Why would I do that when I can just hire an able-bodied actor to play the disabled character?'
If it's just screaming - and I know this sounds so ridiculous - that gets old. But sometimes when there's literal chaos, it's like being in a war zone, and that's kind of exciting. You're just running through the crowd of people chasing after you and no one knows what's going on.
To be honest, everyone thinks that a digital camera is more reliable and every single time I work on any movie, it's just as many problems, the memory card doesn't work or blah blah blah, it overheats; it's the same volume as another camera. I think people are bit taken in by it.
I got to ninth grade and there was wrestling, and I went, 'Wait a minute, this is fun.' Basically, it was a chance for a small kid like me to get a chance to wail on another small kid. I went, 'I love this.' The discipline of it was great. Plus, I really started to be good at it.
A lot of the things that other people from outside the business would see as crazy or strange are just a natural part of the working process. Preparation is key, and detail and collaboration are the rule, but no matter how many hours you spend preparing, there's always something.
I was too kind of brave and proud to want a dialect coach because I thought that showed weakness in my armor. But then you just learn it's a more efficient way of doing it. A dialect coach is really important because it takes a certain technical responsibility off your shoulders.
I'll do anything. I'll shave my head for the right job. I'm partial to my facial hair, I guess, but I also enjoy doing something where I look totally different, which is kind of the reason why I've always worn long hair. I can really change my look radically by getting rid of it.
I walked into the wrong examination room. I'm bad enough at facial recognition... I saw more that day than I cared to. Fortunately, I didn't recognize her from that angle, whoever it was, and I didn't ask. I'm off to a rocky start on the road to fatherhood, but I got a free view.
It's never me saying, 'When is my day over?' It's more, 'When do they legally have to get me off of the lot, based on when I have to be back the next day?' The first call is a big thing in the acting world and in the union world. There needs to be a 12 hour period, and I need it.
As many people have pointed out, the scene in ‘Kung Fu Hustle’ where the Landlady was chasing after me resembled the Roadrunner, … I loved to watch cartoons and read comic books when I was small. In fact, I still watch and read a lot of them now. They give me great ideas.
You can say that I lived in Asia for a long time and in Japan I became close to several CIA agents. And you could say that I became an adviser to several CIA agents in the field and, through my friends in the CIA, met many powerful people and did special works and special favors.
Most of the films I myself like don't do very well. Every director, he has a choice, whether to go for subtlety and try to articulate every minute detail, or to go for the broad strokes and hope that the people will fill in between the lines. I tend to go for the broader strokes.
It's okay to take yourself too seriously if you're a serious actor and you've got the scrubs on. And then with me, it's kind of like, well, I'm a comedian, I'm making fun of everybody and everything. And I'm making fun of myself. I'm having fun making fun of and for other people.
You go to drama school, and the people you revere and admire are those who work on the London stage, and you hope that's a world that you'll be able to break into and do enough occasional television and small film work to eventually get to the point where you're paying the bills.
As far as the leading man/romantic lead, I'll tell you what, I really enjoyed my experience more than I thought or imagined I would on 'Catch and Release.' God bless them if they want to give me another shot at that. I would love to have that as something I can go to on occasion.