I notice the older I get, the more my speaking voice turns people around. Even if they have no idea who I am, they know they've heard this weird nasal disaster somewhere before.
In the best-case scenario, the audience sees themselves in your shoes. The only way you can do that is if you try to play it as if it was happening to you.
My mom said to me when I was a little kid, "You don't have to hate your job. Just because you see all these unhappy grown-ups doesn't mean you have to be one of them." She said, "Find something that you would do for free and find a way to get paid to do it." That's been my guiding principle.
If you want to make god laugh, make a plan.
No one has a resume that they are 100% comfortable with, nor does anyone have a life that they are 100% comfortable with.
I do feel the weight of being the steward of the greatest sport the world ever came up with. I grew up with a love and admiration for it, so I feel an obligation to portray it as electric and terrifying and exciting and beautiful, and all these sometimes contradicting things that make hockey what it is.
Rigidity is the enemy of acting. And I think that people who stay up all night focusing on every beat they're going to do the next day always end up getting screwed.
I know it's going to sound like a cliché, but the key of successful playing a role is to sort of keep it real and earnest and react the way that one would react in those situations. Where the disconnect between the movie and the audience would happen is if you go too big or too crazy with that stuff.
If it were up to me, every job would be somewhere in Canada.
I just adore being on set. I adore storytelling. I can be on a set 70 hours a week and on those weekends, I'll still want to watch movies.
Montreal is a great town. There's equal parts blue-collar town.
I have a little sister, and I'm constantly annoyed [by] how terribly written most females are in most everything - and especially in comedy. Their anatomy seems to be the only defining aspect of their character, and I just find that untrustful and it straight-up offends me.
I'd say that the No. 1 attribute you need as an actor is to be malleable. You need to be able to change and tailor what you're doing to what the situation dictates.
I count absolutely no chickens before they're hatched. In fact, I assume they're all dead in their shells, inside their eggs.
Movies are the greatest art form the world has come up with yet. If you don't use them to the full extent and you don't give people as much as you possibly can, you're doing a disservice to it.
I'm a chronic ad-libber. So whoever hires me, often to their chagrin, should know that I will be talking a bunch of smack.
You always want to try and evolve an art form. It's not a very humble ambition; it reeks of arrogance. If you can, you want to try to do something that people haven't done before and give people something that they haven't seen.
What I love about [TV] is this: It's a specific thing to be able to tell a satisfying, rewarding story in less than 25 minutes. Not everyone can pull that off. There's something really cool about giving lit people a bunch of little mini movies.
I don't work in movies and TV because I adore acting, it's because I adore movies and TV.
You grow up skinny in Canada; in working-class Montreal, you're definitely the underdog.
For every big American movie I've done where I was the supporting guy, I've gone back home to Canada to do supporting movies where I was the lead.
Long before I ever started acting, believe it or not, I always knew I wanted to be a director.
I am a proud Montrealer. Jobs will take me where they take me, but nothing will ever be able to convince me to leave my home.
When I started acting, my mom said, "If you want to go to film school and eventually direct, being on set is probably the best film school in the world." I'm incredibly grateful for the career I've had, but I was an actor to be a part of movies and TV, not the other way around.
It's something I want to do going forward - make a movie that is commercial and universal and will play in any movie theater or living room in the States or the UK, but is definitively Canadian. I don't think there's such a thing as prohibitively Canadian.
