In my life, all of the best things that have happened to me have almost invariably been accidents or fate.
The hard part about playing 'chicken' is knowing when to flinch.
I'm sure one reason I became an actor is my basic unwillingness to live one life.
My metaphor for acting in movies - not on stage because it's completely different on stage - is to put colors on an easel for the director to paint his own painting with in the editing room, long after I've left. You buy me for red and black, so I better give you really great red and black, but if I can give you purple, pink, green and brown too, I will.
They say God looks after kids and idiots, and I think actors are probably a combination of the two.
The full extent of the problem of hunger is not obvious to most of us. We see the homeless, but there are a great number of working poor, struggling to survive, who don't have enough money to put adequate food on the table. We must find a solution to this ever-increasing problem - and quickly.
At my age, to still be able to do parts that are super physical, I'm lucky. I'm doing more fun stuff now than I ever have in my life. I'm just really fortunate.
You can't expect a man like me to be loyal to just one woman.
Acting gives you cosmic permission to take a trip in movies that lasts 24 hours a day, seven days a week, until the film is finished.
J.J. Abrams wanted me to do a part in Lost and we probably had three meetings, and I finally turned it down, but it wasn't because I didn't like television or Lost, although I think I said to J.J., "I don't want to be in Hawaii and have an insurance person tell me I'm not allowed to go free dive and spear fishing." That would be the worst kind of torture in the world. But I don't hate television.
Damon Lindelof said, "There are three kinds of prophets - crazy people, like the Guilty Remnant, false prophets, who just want money, sexy and power and use that to get it, and real prophets - and you're a real prophet in 'The Leftovers'. The voices that speak to you never tell you a lie." And I said, "Name me some real prophets." He said, "Buddha, Jesus and Muhammad." I said, "Which one am I?" And he said, "None of them. You're probably closer to Moses than anyone."
I'm the most computer illiterate human being that ever lived. My grandkids do everything for me, and then they say, "I won't even explain it to you, grandpa, 'cause you won't get it."
I often give my wife Carol scripts I'm offered and want her opinion - because she's a really smart lady, and she's got nothing to do with this business, so I get the audience's point of view.
I'm not a comic book guy. I've never been to Comic-Con. I don't know anything about that. It's a whole different world.
That one long scene in the Leftovers I have with David Gulpilil was seven pages long. When we finished it, Mimi Leder said, "I thought you were gonna do this in bits and pieces. You just did the whole thing." And I literally couldn't remember the scene. It wasn't that I was in a trance. I said, "Just keep shooting takes until you see what you want." In 48 years of acting, which is also how long I've been married, that had never happened to me.
Very often, when you're playing people who love each other, or who hate each other, you manufacture those feelings. You have to do that a lot.
Very rarely do actors, even with features, get to live with a part for that long and really dig into it.
What I didn't realize about television was that's true of acting, as well. You have that space of time to develop who you are, and you can use more and more of yourself. The lines between that character that I'm playing and myself become more and more blurred and, after awhile, they just disappear, altogether.
We were talking about television one time, and Damon Lindelof said he felt that, if Ernst Hemingway was writing for media, he would write feature films, and Lev Tolstoy and Fedor Dostoyevsky would write television series because there are some stories you just can't tell in two hours.
The third season of the Leftovers came along and Damon Lindelof sent me the script to Episode 3, and I called him up and thanked him for one of the greatest gifts I've been given. I had that script for almost two months, in the mountains in Idaho, before I even got on a plane and flew to Australia and went to the outback. He also told me to learn about the indigenous people in Australia and learn how to play a didgeridoo. It was just great. It was probably, in many ways, the best acting experience I've ever had.
I love the way Damon Lindelof writes. It's almost like he was channeling me and he had my voice, even though the territory that those lines cover is unpredictable, and goes from raw emotion to laugh out loud funny but always true.
I watched some of Lost series. And I realized that the character they wanted me to play didn't really come in for a long time. It would have just been the wrong thing for me to do.
There was a play that was written by who I think is America's greatest playwright, and he wrote a small part in it for me. It was going to open in Chicago, and then go to New York. But then, he died. It was Arthur Miller. That was the reason I turned Lost down.
I had a job on a newspaper in Wisconsin, and I started off as most reporters did back then: writing obits and free ad giveaways.
I'm way more comfortable around kids than I am people my own age.
