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Obviously sex and nudity sells, but that's what people go to cable for but that's not going to happen on network daytime television... so I think it really is always going to come down to story. How do you make a story interesting enough so people will tune in? That's always going to be it.
I certainly very much enjoy acting, but I am open to anything really. I think it's important when you have those moments in life when you are not attached to something, and you are not quite sure what the next phase of your journey is going to look like, that you don't pigeon-hole yourself.
It's always difficult when you want to do something really new, and you also want it to reach the masses, because the majority of people want to see what they've already seen before, or that they're already familiar with. To open the majority of peoples' minds to something new is difficult.
I think that'll always be there for [Clint] Barton, right? You have real life, and then you have fight life. And that's the character that I love now - discovering that in him makes him a very sort of accessible Avenger. That'll always be there, I'm sure. And it certainly plays in this one.
I'm a physical actor in that I start with a physical sketch of the character. I find it easier to find inspiration from the outside in. If I find the character's tensions and the way he carries himself or looks, that's going to affect how I talk. So that's how I start to create that person.
We retell our favorite stories. That's what we've done since we were sitting around campfires. It's a part of the human spirit. It doesn't have to be negative to creativity. It can be completely opposite. That's how you can break new ground: by rethinking something that's already been done.
It's very interesting, I had an extremely intense experience with my dad in 2002, when he was an old man and very ill and I was taking care of him and my mother, and he was extremely depressed, virtually lost the will to live, and I realized my main job was cheering him up to save his life.
If I can avoid the mirror when I brush my teeth in the morning, I will. I find security and safety in the most profound degree of ignorance. If you can just stay ignorant of almost everything you'll be OK. It's fine to stay informed and look at things, but to judge things will bog you down.
'Thor' has got several big battles in it, a reckless, headstrong young hero who has to confront his past and deal with a complicated relationship with his father, it has lots of savage Europeans hacking each other to death at various points, and all of this sounded very much like 'Henry V.'
If we want a great future in this world, we have to take God at his word, and God makes it really clear that society and civilization is held together by the glue of families... This is where the next generation of human beings are incubated and nurtured and matured - in homes. In families.
I'm remixing an R.E.M. track called 'I've Been High' from their last album, 'Reveal.' It's a beautiful song, but record execs didn't put it out as a single because it didn't sound like the R.E.M. we're used to. So I asked Michael Stipe if I could have the tapes to do a remix, and he agreed.
I decided I wanted to be a musician when I saw the movie 'Amadeus' around 1987. I was five years old, so it was a good time to start piano lessons after seeing Tom Hulce who played Mozart play the harpsichord on his back with his hands crossed. Such a great movie to inspire a five-year-old.
Will Ferrell and I are teaming up again on a film called Daddy's Home. In the movie I play a Special-Ops soldier who has just discovered that Will Ferrell's character is married to my ex-wife and is my children's stepfather. So, I have to come home and try to win them back and take him out.
Acting, in general, is something most people think they're incapable of, but they do it from morning to night. The subtlest acting I've ever seen is by ordinary people trying to show they feel something they don't, or trying to hide something. It's something everyone learns at an early age.
We must work on our souls, enlarging and expanding them. We do so by experiencing all of life-the beauty and the joy as well as the grief and pain. Soul work requires paying attention to life, to the laughter and the sorrow, the enlightening and the frightening, the inspiring and the silly.
I think it's because we're looking for the meaning. Where is the meaning? We have mindless jobs, we take frantic vacations, deficit finance trips to the mall to buy more things that we think are going to fill these holes in our lives. Is it any wonder that we've lost our sense of direction?
I got the acting bug back because I felt like all of a sudden maybe after all these years, maybe I might have something to offer again. I walked away from it after 'Signs' because I just felt I was a bit stale and it wasn't ringing my bells, so I focused on directing, writing and producing.
I like being able to do all of my own stunts. I appreciate stunt guys and what they do and, of course, the time and the effort that they put in, but for me, I'm young. You only live once, so to be able to do all your own stunts, train, become a real fighter... I feel like I can hold my own.
There are good and bad times in a relationship. You start to understand more about how a relationship can go awry when two people spend too much time together. They tend to overlook all of the red flags that pop up early because they want to make it work and they want to believe it's right.
I like going to museums and stuff, but I also like going out and doing lots of physical activity like camping and hiking. I like doing stuff that I've never done before. Curiosity is a big thing. Usually it means that people are intelligent and that they want to learn stuff about the world.
Every time a film comes together, usually the studio executives come up for a day to the set. If you're out of town, they'll fly in or wherever you are - the cast, the director, the producers - all get together and have a big dinner and celebrate the fact that we're about to start shooting.
If properly dried and trimmed, New York-style pizza could be used to make a box for Chicago-style pizza. I love a slice when I'm in NYC, but it's like eating a Slim Jim compared with a filet mignon. One slice of Gino's East stuffed sausage pizza is a bigger meal than an entire New York pie.
My first motion capture game was with Sony - NBA: The Life. It was very ahead of its time. Brandon Akiaten, he was the writer and director. He had a real vision of what this game was meant to be; it was a basketball game where I was the Jerry Maguire sports agent type guy. And it was great!
People think that, somehow, size makes you uncoordinated or incompetent. There is a lot of size discrimination out there, and I see the difference in the way people treated me when I was 360 pounds versus how they treat me when I'm 290 - from the industry to day-to-day people on the street.
The thing is, if I try to talk about acting, I come off as moaning. But I'm privileged. I think it's all about control. Acting is vulnerable because you're not in control of anything. You have to give up a lot of your trust; it's up to somebody else what they do with what you've given them.
I was never the class clown or put on shows at home. I never thought of acting as something I could do with my life. When I was a kid, I used to run around wrapped in toilet paper so I could be the Mummy. But that wasn't a sign that I was dreaming of being an actor. I was just an odd child.
I'm much more collaborative than I probably was when I was first starting, much more willing to say, "I don't know the answer to that." I have really talented people and let them do their jobs and not try to control everything as much as I did when I was starting. I was a bit more insecure.
People call me a movie star. If you're in the business, a movie star is someone who can make a film bankable. My name and $6 million will make a $6 million movie. I'm a working actor. Because I started late, I had a very short run as a leading man, and my films didn't make money in America.
If you do a character, always make the character with a big question mark. Even if the character is very enigmatic and all over the place, make him always with a question mark, because if you turn a question mark upside down, like they do in South America in Spanish, then it becomes a hook.
It felt after the Bonds, after my four outings as James Bond, there seemed to be unfinished business. And the way that the Bond finished in my life and the demise of Bond going off stage left into the night, it seemed like there was a certain void there, as they say, of unfinished business.
Being an actor means asking people to look at you. I guess I accept that. But it's a profession in which the job is to show another world and other people. You may access it through bits of yourself, and your imagination and experience, but actually, in the end, you're not playing yourself.
Louisville, Colorado, which was just voted by CNN and Money magazine as the best place to live, is a veritable Whitopia that is unaffected by the housing crisis and even the severe recession. You look at the best places to live, according to Money's 2009 list, and 9 of the 10 are Whitopias.
I don't meet many people that are evil. I meet human beings who are flawed, who are mentally ill and have enormous problems, but I don't think I've ever met someone who was a totally dark energy that had no humanity or sense of love or affection for anything in their life. That's very rare.
When I see David Attenborough talking about how chimps live, big apes, I just remember my dad and the way he'd look at you. He couldn't speak, but everything else about him was, 'This is us, a family.' Relationships are just as intense as they are for people who can speak. Probably more so.
When you're 5 ft. 5 in., have a round Jewish face and wear glasses and refuse to wear contacts, you're going to get offered certain parts. People thought of me as the nerdy guy, even in non-nerdy parts like 'Parenthood.' I didn't feel the need to change anything I was doing - I embraced it.
I used to wear my mom's Wayfarers. When the people of Ray Ban noticed that, they sent me a box full of sunglasses, two and a half years ago. Now they're all gone. They've disappeared during trips, many were also stolen from me, the rest I lost again and again. Now I have only one pair left.
I was doing progressively smaller movies in England, after Harry Potter... to the point where I was doing nine-day shoots for, like, 20p and a packet of Space Invaders. And then this happened. So I'm not just another actor who's around and jobbing. When you hire me for a job, you're hiring.
The interesting thing about Sherlock is that he is himself a reflection of that very English duality. As a drug addict, he is a criminal. But he is also a crime fighter. That makes him an extremely potent character to personify the hypocrisy of a culture that is both moralistic and corrupt.
The whole point of being in the Army is wanting to get killed, wanting to test yourself to the limits. Now you have to fly 15,000ft above the war zone to avoid getting hit. I don't think there is any point in having wars if that's how you're going to behave. It's pathetic. All this whining!
I was doing a tour of the 'Batman' live stage production, and I challenged the cast to join me to run. One time, we were running in Switzerland just before Christmas, and it was heavy snow. Another time, we were running down the Seine in Paris on Christmas Day, and we all had Santa hats on.
My partner, Jeff Ullrich, and I always thought Earwolf was going to be big. There were a couple of studies before we launched saying podcasts were going to really grow. But I remember so many conversations at the beginning where people would say, 'How are you going to make money with this?'
A lot of people celebrate their past, but I don't look at it all. I don't Google myself; I focus on the future. This is a volatile profession, and the moment you start thinking you've got something, that's when the floor beneath you falls through, so I hope to make more movies and TV shows.
I came here from Romania when I was 12 years old. I had an accent. High school was tough a little bit for a few years. I wanted to fit in. I wanted to be liked. I wanted to be good-looking. I wanted to be popular. I spent a lot of time thinking, 'What are these people going to think of me?'
I always honestly dreamed of coming to Second City in Chicago, although I've never even been there to see a show. But I did a ton of sketch comedy at the Second City in LA, which (at the time, in a different location) wasn't really a theater, it was just a space where you took some classes.
In France, they call the people who come to the theatre 'les spectateurs'; in Britain and Ireland, they are the audience, the people who listen. This does not mean the French are not interested in language. On the contrary. It actually says more about the undeveloped visual sense over here.
To open the possibility for self-honesty, you have to develop insight, which can be achieved through meditation, therapy, other sorts of sensitivity training, and simply spending periods of time alone to find out who you really are, what you really believe, and what you really, really want.
One of my favorite things to do, when the ghost light is on and it's just an empty stage - I'll let my shadow spread right across the theater, and I just say to myself, 'For the next few hours, these folks are my responsibility. I get to share in something that is unique.' It's like church.
I find things funny that aren't self-aware. That don't know they're funny, and I think the same can hold true for drama. If you think you're in this tragedy and you play it for tragedy, there's a self-awareness there that I think takes you out of watching it and I believe it cuts both ways.
What I mean is that none of my talents had a - what's that great word - rubric. A singer, an actor, a dancer - there was nothing I could really say I was. The writing came much later. And, actually, thank God, because if I had said I'm a singer, I would really have just had one thing to do.
When Savage died, that was hard on me. I didn't even hardly know Randy, but I just turned 51 this past December, and he was 58 when he died. I'm like, 'Hey man, just because I'm in that line of work, do I have an expiration date? Am I supposed to go?' I always wonder, but I don't harbor it.