Once you've been booked, people in Hollywood say, 'Oh he must be good.' All the while you're the same actor.
I never pretended to be a great actor.
I have no regrets, except perhaps one: I should have tried harder to be a better actor.
Being an actor in movies is a lot about the power of your imagination and making the circumstance real to you so the audience will feel that it's real.
That's one of the great privileges, being an actor, is that someone pays you and sends you off to learn about something that otherwise you'd never know about.
I'm not scared of doing movies that are just about entertainment. I'm not scared of doing movies that are really challenging and cover difficult terrain. I just want good experiences and I want to challenge myself and I want to just keep learning, as an actor.
One of the things I've always enjoyed is moving around and staying fit. Physicality is such a big part of being an actor, but it's also about stillness and silence.
It's really easy to finish a movie and sort of immediately dive into the next one, because I love working with actors so much and being on set, my inclination is to try to get back to that as soon as possible. There's just never much of a gap.
A lot of the people I'm working with are not actors, or it's their first time in a movie. I'm not trying to shape performances, coax performances out of them. It's more like I want to put them in situations that naturally work or allow them to be themselves. If it's not happening, I'll just completely switch it up, rather than trying to make it work.
As an actor, you get humbled all the time. Everyone is a critic.
I was very familiar with both actors, as well as Christina Hendricks and Bill Sage, Jimmi Simpson, Polly McIntosh, but the other main actors were new to me. And they were all terrific. Just amazing. Actually, Lowell Northrop optioned Savage Season from me, first book in the series, and I wrote a screenplay.
When I interview somebody, I look at their resume to see what they've done, who they've worked with, and how many times. If they've gotten repeat work. Those are the kinds of actors I want to hire.
My ego's not the kind that says, 'I want to be an actor and be accepted as that.
I know there are different kinds of actors, but I tend to have less effective relationships with actors who have a very private process - who really need to do lots of internal work, so that I become merely a witness until they're ready to share.
I think of being an actor as a blue-collar profession.
Actors are journeymen. We show up for work. We do the job and then we go. What goes on behind the scenes is what goes on behind the scenes.
I'm an actor that cares.
All actors almost always try to steal some of their wardrobe.
Actors always loved props and-so instead of a hat or an umbrella, they feel really comfortable with a cigarette as a prop.
In the olden days, of course, cigarette companies would pay to have their product advertised in movies and to have actors smoke cigarettes.[Ronald Reagan used to do it.]
There are dedicated actors and there are people now who only stay famous for putting on weight, losing it, then putting it on again.
I like working with kid actors because they surprise you constantly. I mean, all actors do - but kids particularly.
I didn't grow up really wanting to be an actor. I don't remember ever not being an actor.
Most actors don't really have a director's sensibility. They have an actor's sensibility.
Adolescence is a tough one to be a child actor.
