Well, the nice thing about animation, you don't even really have to account for yourself. All of the physical stuff that you work on as an actor, you just throw away.
I certainly never expected to be a professional actor. I never expected to be in movies. I thought I would probably become a teacher.
As an actor, you get hired to repeat yourself. It wears you out.
Almost every actor goes into almost every picture very frightened. He is positive he really can't do it. The bigger the star, the more frightened he is.
I think basically an actor is a salesman.
It turns out that good actors can make anything believable.
The actor's job is to divine and embody the truth, and find it.
I feel like in a lot of ways I've gotten kind of soft as an actor, not doing stage stuff. In terms of being a better actor, it's really important.
As an actor, to have achieved financial stability is amazing. But I always have this weird fear that I'm not going to get any more work; it's about not having enough money.
It is because my dad died suddenly that I became an actor. I thought, I'm going to make money doing this thing I enjoy.
I think that one of the strangest things about being an actor is, it's almost freelance work.
After working with so many great actors and acting students in film school, it was a whole other thing working with Luke [Kirby].
I come down as an actor and my marks are already laid out on the floor - somebody else organized what I'm going to do. I think, why am I here? And why I'm here is to express the words with some sort of vague emotion and make them seem real. I wanted to go back to how it was before.
I wanted to know as the director how the actors wanted to tell this story I wanted to know what they thought.
I don't want to infantilize the actor; I want to empower the actor. Actors can be many things, but all of the really good ones are really great storytellers, and I'm interested in that. If you're not interested in that as a director then you better be Stanley Kurbrick.
Doing 'Young Adult' was really reassuring to me in a lot of ways. It confirmed a lot of suspicions I had about great actors.
For me, I always have to establish a reality for the character. In very actor-y terms, you just have to understand his reality.
There are actors that are really fine actors but not good auditioners. There are really good auditioners that may not be great actors. There are great actors that are really good auditioners, too. I happen to be someone who's not a great auditioner, but usually on a set can hold my own.
I was just excited by the whole prospect of working in a television series in Hollywood. I had never anticipated that as an actor I would ever end up here. It may be some sort of fantasy I'd thought about from time to time, but it was completely unrealistic.
Where can I go that would give me the same level of satisfaction as an actor?
As an actor, it doesn't happen often that somebody sends you a script that is first of all that good.
Some like to start from the inside and then go to the outside. I'm the other type of actor. First, I have to know how my character looks, how he walks, how he drives, how he eats.
I'm a trained actor and I can always tone it down, I can always simplify the work I've done. But if I'm asked to bring the nuanced and complicated work, I'll have it in my pocket, and all that information helps.
I'm so blessed to have been a working actor. If they still would like to make me a superstar, I'm available, but so far, being a working actor has been great. It's taken me everywhere.
As much as I'd like to pretend that I'm not performing, I think any actor sometimes has themselves outside of themselves and is trying to direct themselves and control what you're seeing and thinking.
