I understand acting and I understand actors. I don't really understand the world of celebrity. That's just bizarre. Those sorts of elements I'm at sea with.
I think as an actor you can feel when something's right and when something's resonating. I don't think that there's necessarily a right and a wrong. I think it's just a matter of being honest and telling a story.
All my characters are me. I'm not a good enough actor to become a character. I hear about actors who become the role and I think 'I wonder what that feels like.' Because for me, they're all me.
If you're a serious actor, it's when you know you're going to die tomorrow that you really start to feel it.
Nothing can teach you what it's like to work on a film set, and the best education there can be for an actor is to walk up the street and observe human nature.
I was a serious method actor until I visited this site.
My preference is live performance, because you get the feedback. There's an energy. It's live theater. That's why I think actors like that.
Directing requires great discipline, that ability to be in and out at the same time. The great ones I've worked with are like generals. It's a bit like a small war on that level. The great ones have that combination of freedom and control. I'm nowhere near that. There's still so much to do as an actor. I have enough to explore with that.
As a director, I wouldn't like me as an actor. As an actor, I wouldn't like me as a director.
My biggest problem in my life is I'm cheap and I didn't hire a publicist. In every awkward interview, normally actors get these things scripted.
All of my favourite actors are American and I grew up watching American movies. It's weird, but I used to do a New Jersey accent in every audition in the States just because I liked to do it, really. It's completely bizarre. Everybody would ask: 'Where are you from?' And I would say, 'Oh, I'm from London.'
The crew, the actors and the writers all work the same way. We always want to do the best job.
A young actor once asked me, What do you do between jobs? I said, Hobbies, hobbies, and more hobbies.
I have a reputation for being an improvisational actor, which is true, but I also know what I'm doing so that if the improvisational strand doesn't work I can go back to what I know's already there.
I was certainly a child of the '60s, and I came out of that era, and as a young actor, I got cast as a lot of counterculture hippie types.
[Jodie Foster] is one of my favorite actors and people in the business.
It's part of your job as an actor to put your personal problems behind you and work. Good actors can do that.
[J.F.Kennedy] is an iconic figure. And to make it even worse, he's a hero of mine. And every actor will tell you that you can't play heroes. And you can't play villains. You can only play human beings.
Most actors will tell you that villains are the most interesting to play.
I don't know if child actors are necessarily more screwed up than most people.
When an actor asks you to read his script, your heart sinks. The number of scripts I've been given by actors that are so unbelievably terrible!
Learning the craft as an actor in Los Angeles is a very hard thing to do, in my opinion. We all come from a certain world and when you start learning the craft, you need material to read/study that you can relate to. We do not have too many Latino writers on the West Coast that I was able to relate to (or at least, I didn't know at the time). I came from the streets, so the most published authors had no relation to my world. As soon as I picked up Pinero & Guirgis, it was all over. It was my world, just in a different location. They cracked me open inside and out.
The most interesting part of filming is what the actors do. That's the primary link between the story and the audience.
Actors who say they don't watch TV are stupid. I was raised by TV! And it's how I research for auditions.
I consider it an actor going to work with other actors. It's not a competitive sport, it's not to outact anybody else, sorta thing, you can be a bad actor but you don't outact anybody, you just bring your character as best as you can.
