Normally our season is seven weeks in the Drama Theatre and four weeks in the Opera Theater.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
In theater, we know a scheduled season months in advance.
When you're the lead actor in a drama, you have 2 1/2 months at the end of a season to do other projects, and everything has to get done in that time.
When you're doing a play that's fully produced, you have the benefit of rehearsing for four or five weeks, so you really get to live in the skin of the character for much longer than when you first start doing a character on TV.
When the show's in production, we work for three weeks at a time and then take a week off.
You really, really, really have to love what you are going to do in theater because it is an unmerciful life. It's six days a week. It's eight performances a week. And that's doing the exact same thing over and over and over again.
In TV, you're basically shooting an episode in 10 to 14 days; 14 days is a luxury situation. And in film, you have anywhere from a month to three months, or it can be even longer than that, depending on what the production is.
For a London play, rehearsal time would be four weeks for the entire show. In films, I'd spend six weeks on the big dance numbers to get them perfect before the actual shooting.
Doing a sitcom is like doing a play - you rehearse for three or four days, and then you shoot what you rehearsed on Friday night in front of an audience. An hour-long drama is like shooting a movie. You're shooting 13-14 hour days. The endurance itself is different.
It takes a week to do a sitcom in Hollywood. I do a show a day in my studio, three or four shows a week.
The theatre only knows what it's doing next week, not like the opera, where they say: What are we going to do in five years' time? A completely different attitude.