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Joey being one of my finest performances ever. Matt LeBlanc's basically doing the same thing right now, playing himself on Episodes. When I did Joey, I really leaned on them to make me the biggest ass they possibly could, because, frankly, everyone in their heart of hearts thinks of themselves that way. Or at least I do, anyway.
It's a familiar story now: a meek and depressed high school chemistry teacher with terminal cancer cooks up a scheme to make and market a superior grade of methamphetamine to provide a nest egg for his family after he's gone. But over the course of five seasons Walter White goes from milquetoast to murderous in order to survive.
I remember being very affected by what was going on there towards the end of Apartheid. And the subject is still very pertinent, politically, to what's happening around the world today, in terms of negotiating peace talks. I had always been interested in this period of change in South Africa, generally, for a variety of reasons.
Life flies by, and it's easy to get lost in the blur. In adolescence, it's 'How do I fit in?' In your 20s, it's 'What do I want to do?' In your 30s, 'Is this what I'm meant to do?' I think the trick is living the questions. Not worrying so much about what's ahead but rather sitting in the grey area - being OK with where you are.
For me, personally, there is one really interesting thing. You're all a bit too young for that, but when you get to a certain level of experience, accumulation of experience you start slowly to once in a while get a whiff of the feeling, I'd love to be twenty years younger but with what I know and have experienced at this point.
I take my hat off to the ladies. The amount of grooming-plucking and shaving and all the other things men never have to do. I went down and spent time with transvestites in London in the clubs and all that. Got an insight to that world, and it's a mad world, but they are very warm and very open people. It was a great experience.
For me, for the type of addict I am, when I start getting those swirly thoughts and stuff, and they talk about slippery places, slippery people and slippery things, you know, I need to - I needed to take my cell phone and eliminate all the phone numbers, change the phone numbers so no one I knew before could call me or reach me.
The play I was doing [on a Broadway ], I was playing an obnoxious, outspoken kid, so [the director James Lapine ] saw me do the play, and he was like, "That's what I'm looking for." I tested for the part [in Life With Mikey]. Back then, I used to do screen tests. I mean, they still do every once in awhile, but it was a big deal.
The oddest things happen to me. It goes in seasons. Nothing will happen for a long time, and I miss it, and I remember how these strange coincidences used to happen to me and how amazing it was, how it made me want to believe in something. A year will go by, and then a slew of them will come along, like buses, one after another.
I went to school with Steven Wright, who was the shyest guy I knew, and one day someone suddenly told me that he was in a club doing standup comedy. I went down to his club and he was great. Another friend of mine, who was pretty much a thief by trade, was hosting the show. So I thought, 'If these guys can do it, then so can I.'
Only funny line I've had was my first day on the set of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. They were making me up, and I saw the director call the makeup man over, and he says "What are we going to do about the hooter?" And the makeup guy said, "I'm not a plastic surgeon." So I started that show with a big nose, and quite conscious of it.
You know, some of the action stuff, I tend to have a pretty good sense of humor about it. Even when I direct and have a lot of pressure, it teaches me to laugh at stuff. I think that comes also from sports, from combat sports, where you've got to learn to laugh at it and take it in stride. Otherwise, you just can't deal with it.
I'd love to play a Bond villain. Yeah, I'd love to play a Bond villain. Everyone always says this to me; they always say, 'You've got to be a Bond villain', 'We're going to make you a Bond villain...' But they've never, ever approached me, I've never had a whiff of it. I think I'd love to play a Bond villain; I'd have great fun.
The drones are really interesting - how have the troops withdrawn from Afghanistan? Because we've upped the drone strikes and most of the country doesn't even really know what that means or who we're killing or... it's such a new weapon that we don't know what the long term impacts of that kind of military action is going to be.
You can imagine an already unstable mind that's completely entitled and has been given anything they wanted, throughout their whole life, and lived in a bubble with a domineering, in a very quietly manipulating way, mother, that child mentality never gets a chance to mature and discover its own limitations. It just runs rampant.
A huge part of what we do as actors is learning to ignore the camera, as if it's not even there, while simultaneously being very aware of the camera and what it's capturing, because you can give the best performance of your life, but if you do it with the back of your head facing the camera, it's going to get cut from the movie.
I grew up with an impatience with the anti-scientific. So I'm a bit miffed with our current love affair with all things Eastern. If I sneeze on the set, 40 people hand me echinacea. But I'd no sooner take that than eat a pencil. Maybe that's why I took up boxing. It's my response to men in white pajamas feeling each other's chi.
The first piece of art that I ever bought-when I could afford it-was a Warhol sketch from the period when he was just getting out of doing commercial work and more into art. It's a sketch of a young guy's face. I guess the gallery that I bought it from thought I would like it because the young guy kind of looked like James Dean.
Acting is a way to escape who you are for a short period of time. It doesn't happen all the time , but every now and then, the sensation of being 'other' is very profound. You get this moment where you are no longer yourself. You lose consciousness of the crew or the audience... it's a thrilling moment. And even quite spiritual.
As a director, you have a thousand things going on in your head, and of course, that's going to be difficult. That's going to mean that some things get overlooked. And so, for us as performers, being the selfish pricks that we are, we're sitting there being concerned about ourselves all the time and our character's through-line.
There's a book that I read, really a great book - it's called 'Lone Survivor' and I think they're trying to make it into a movie. I would love to play Marcus Luttrell, who was the author and the 'lone survivor.' He's a national hero; he's very courageous and heroic in insurmountable danger, so it's something I'd love to explore.
'Lonesome Dove' was the movie. I watched that over and over and over again, and I know every line. It was one that I loved as a kid for all the horses and characters that went over my head, but then the older I got, I realized how amazing it was on so many other different levels - Robert Duvall and Tommy Lee Jones' relationship.
I think, as an actor, it is good to feel the fear of failing miserably. I think you should take that risk. Fear is a necessary ingredient in everything I do. But if I do 'Hamlet,' it will probably be in a small theater on a small stage, and it will have to be very, very soon because I'm getting a little long in the tooth for it.
All my friends were in college when I was making 'Superbad.' We were drinking beer and watching movies and eating pizza. It wasn't like I was going to nice restaurants or anything like that, and I lived like a frat guy. Eventually it was time to grow up, be healthy and be responsible. You can't live like a kid forever, you know?
I had a fun high school experience. We had a big old prom, we had 400 kids in the graduating class and everything. It was a fun night. I enjoyed the limo ride there the most. Me and a couple friends riding with their dates, everyone was all dressed up, and I was into it, the energy and the anticipation of that entire experience.
Ray Comfort does it again! With simplicity and keen insight on the streets, he pulls back the curtain of Evolution and reveals that the Great Wizard of Darwinism is just an insecure little man with a dream of becoming a god. I highly recommend this helpful, faith-building, and inspiring video for families, teachers, and pastors!
Being known as a writer did change the relationships I had with directors. The rap on actors is that they always want to inflate their parts. But when directors know you write screenplays and have a different view of things, you really get invited into the huddle in a much fuller way. And those collaborations end in friendships.
Sometimes you know about a job four months in advance. Sometimes you know about a job four days in advance. It's all different, and my thing is just to try to stay prepared. It's like being a boxer. You never know when you're going to get your next fight, so you have to just stay in shape, mentally and physically and creatively.
Those three years on 'Loving' were instrumental in helping me move through the next few years of work, where it was hit or miss. I was on series that would get canceled, then I would be a movie that wouldn't come out or do as well as I hoped. You learn that you have to just keep plugging away and never take anything for granted.
I loved school. Not sure how much I focused on the education; just had fun and played lacrosse for seven years. It was lucky I had sport, which I was good at, so it didn't matter that I wasn't great on the academic side, or not brilliant at drama. Although I am still bitter about not being in the school choir. Furious, actually.
I don't think 'Call Of Duty: Black Ops' sells 25 million plus copies and makes of a billion dollars because of their great storytelling. It's the multiplayer aspect of that type of game, where people get together to shoot each other and have fun. And it's very much gameplay; it's like 'Gran Turismo' or one of these racing games.
I studied journalism at The University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill. I did my graduate work at Emerson in Boston, and I was actually a reporter for a year in New York and New Jersey. It dawned on me that I wasn't cut out for that line of work. I mean... there's a certain thing that really good reports have that I just didn't.
In attempting to explain F For Fake's state-side failure, it has occurred to me that perhaps the subject matter was at least partially to blame, and that this country is so blissfully enslaved by the notion of the special sanctity of the expert that an overtly anti-expert film was bound to go too much against the national grain.
I remember when I was at the first showing of 'John Dies at the End' at Sundance, and I was talking to some of the people in the standby crowd who were outside and didn't have tickets. They were just waiting in line to see if they could get in. It was this whole gang of die-hard sci-fi wacko people, and they were just fantastic.
I would like to like to make one thing clear at the very outset and that is, when you speak of a train robbery, this involved no loss of train, merely what I like to call the contents of the train, which were pilfered. We haven't lost a train since 1946, I believe it was - the year of the great snows when we mislaid a small one.
We spend all this energy keeping our lives normal and safe and predictable, and the result is that our approved cultural safety valve is the movies. So in films, anyway, the hero is obliged to represent the continuance of social values and institutions, and his permission to act is much more seriously limited than the villain's.
I think my most famous was 'Poco's Legend.' It's a white album with a simple line drawing of a horse. It almost has a Picasso feel to it. I remember that Rusty Young, the lead singer of the band, said, 'I want you to draw a horse for the song 'Legend,' which is about a phantom spirit horse. I want you to do it in several lines.'
We've got to get off oil. And it's possible. It'll take a dramatic shift in the way we think and how our infrastructure works, but we as Americans have proven time and again that we can tackle change head on. Yeah, it's a challenge, but it doesn't have to be a painful one. We just have to recalibrate our thinking on the subject.
Improv definitely made me a better auditioner, without a doubt. We did do an audition semester in grad school, and that was helpful for those times that you have a script and you have a few days to prepare it, to really work on sides. But the auditions I was doing in New York, if you got it the night before, you were very lucky.
A lot of my inspiration comes from the movies and TV, watching other people doing things that I one day hope to have the opportunity to do. The other sides would be my friends and family, people who have supported me and always been there for me. I want to do a good job for them and show them they were right for believing in me.
I guess I don't like the fact that my life is becoming less and less my own - the prevailing attitude that you have an obligation to deliver yourself to the public. Actually, you're delivered to the public whether you like it or not. I guess if you don't like it, you should stop doing what provokes it. In my case, that's acting.
Performing comedy in San Francisco to begin with is pretty wild. You've got to - you've got the human game preserve to play off of. And it's a lot of great characters everywhere. You work off that, and then you play the rooms, and eventually you get to a point where you're playing a club that is a comedy club, with other comics.
People don't know how to place me in their consciousness. They think, 'Oh, you must be here to make me look good. That's what gay guys are, right? You're an accessory for my straight life.' Just because your limited view is that everyone's there to serve you and that you're the only person in the world. It doesn't work that way.
If you're an actor, there's going to be a sense of fantasy about yourself, especially in the celebrity world we live in today. You give the illusion of being in control, sexy, at ease, with never a difficult moment. Those are the basic lies that all celebrities tell. For me, they're the more dangerous lies to come to terms with.
Funny story: I was hanging out with Adam Shankman for Samantha Ronson's birthday, and Lance Bass was there. I don't really know Lance, but he comes over to me and goes, 'Hey, I just wanted to let you know I'm a fan of 'Pretty Little Liars' and I'm rooting for your character.' It was surreal! That's how 'PLL' has changed my life.
When I was ten years old, my dad and brother did judo, so I went along because I felt like I was missing out. They eventually gave up, and I continued, then moved into Tae Kwon Do, kickboxing and various other martial arts. I did lots of different things, but mostly things like Wushu, Jeet Kune Do, Krav Maga and stuff like that.
When I first started looking at Twitter, I followed people like Steve Martin, who will just write the funniest non sequiturs now and then, which I thought was really fun. That's kind of the road I've taken. Every now and then, something comes into your mind and you put it out there. It's very innocuous. I think it's kind of fun.
I don't see the women as a problem. The women are doing all they can do. They're heading up households; they're single parents; they're breadwinners; they're the 'mamas,' they're the 'daddies,' they're the 'uncles.' They take the kids to school; they take them to doctors, you know? They take them to games. I see it all the time.
One thing about our show that wasn't even in my awareness, but was brought to my attention by other people, is that our show is about these love-based relationships. Even though the characters are obviously going through different conflicts, you can really feel that the characters love each other. And they really try their best.
Aziz Ansari was on 'Parks and Recreation' for, I don't know, what, seven years? And he was a really popular stand-up comedian. He even says that his Netflix show wouldn't have gotten made unless he created it himself. No one was probably willing to put someone like Aziz as the lead in a show until he actually created it himself.