The Victorian era is the sexiest age for me, but I also like a woman in a pair of jeans.
Sometimes you have to search for inspiration with characters, and other times, they just drop out of the sky and arrive.
When I'm playing a serial killer, I'm in it. I'm not judging him. I'm not judging his environment. I'm just looking for the why. Why is he the way he is? But, there's no doubt that, if you're a good actor, you're going to take this stuff home with you.
Everything keeps changing. People want to label things all the time and once you label it, it changes again.
I always felt like I needed to act. Not that I wanted to act, but I needed to. And, I still feel that same way. There's an expression that I get to have in acting that I can't consciously express in my life. It has always defined me and it always will.
My past is not pleasant; I grew up in a very tough town, Waterbury, Connecticut. I grew up in New York, too, but Waterbury was tougher.
I really am a character actor, in my heart of hearts, because I really do like developing characters and painting a past for them.
In the consciousness of the end is the limitation of the moment.
It's like, no matter what I do, I always feel like I'm five years old, and I end up in the back of my father's car looking out the window, and nothing has changed in 25 years.
I think the most important thing for an actor is to stay current and stay relevant, and those are probably the hardest things to do.
I mean, I always think when you're an actor you have to be the guy running into the burning building rather than running out of it, if you want to make some noise as an actor.
As an actor, you always have to reinvent yourself or you end up in the gutter somewhere. It's my job to always change people's minds. I've known that for a long time and I've had to do it.
I'm always trying to pop up in different genres, what interests me. Sometimes I just like to throw myself into new situations to see what it feel like.
Most of the time people are aiming so low on television. They're trying to reach that common denominator, especially on network television.
My dad was kind of a pool shark and had a Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin thing going on. I've always been fascinated by the fifties because of him. There was a hip, cool, anything-goes atmosphere back then, but looking good was still a priority.
Media runs the world, and it all changed, I think, when the debate between Kennedy and Nixon happened, and first of all we saw them on television, and that changed everything.
People behave badly and people are in prison and people are on death row, and there are no excuses for everybody's behavior, but most people are coming from abuse.
Most actors are starving. Most of us are walking around with a flashlight and tweezers looking for evidence. When you have someone that actually writes an acting role, it's rare.
L.A. is still such a fascinating place to me, so big and diverse. It's so spread out that you can go from Zuma to downtown and there's really like 10 different towns in between.
Once you understand that someone has Tourette and that they can't help their tics, it takes away the distraction. And you can engage your compassion. You feel for them. You embrace them.
I like the Polanski stuff more than anything else. Rosemary's Baby is still one of my favorite movies of all time. The idea of her being impregnated with the devil is just so frightening.
I think everything keeps changing. There was a time when television was a bad thing for actors and it meant that you could only do television, and now we see everyone does television.
It's hard to find success and it's hard to find hit movies or hit TV shows and to stay relevant. I think it's a very difficult thing for actors, because a lot of us get lost, frankly.
You never want to have a movie be derivative, because that's the worst if you ask me. I always want to be in original material, or an original idea, or an original vision, rather than a rehash of some other movie.
I was terrified of the Vietnam War when I was 13. I thought I was going. The draft was such an ominous thing, I felt as if it was going to trickle down to me.
