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.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I have four to five months, tops, per year to give to my acting work.
With movies, it's 10 or 12 or sometimes even 24 weeks, if it's a massive movie, to live within a character. But with a show that's successful, if you start in the first or second season and go until the end, you're always finding new elements of your character that are being added in because you start to live in them as human beings.
I feel like most actors just dig and dig and work and work in whatever way they do to try to do as much as they can to portray a character in the limited time they have to play it, whether it's six months or one month or one week of work, you know.
With acting, you might have a month of very intense work, but you've got a lot of downtime as well.
When you start as an actor, you can only hope you'll be able to act at all - let alone on a show that lasts seven seasons.
Sometimes I think on television, you use maybe a tenth of what you are able to do. So it's nice to go, 'Well, I'm gonna take two months and reinvest in acting and storytelling.' You don't get to do that on television.
It takes a lot out of you to do a one-hour episodic lead of a show. I don't think actors realize that when they take the job.
The advice that I usually give to young actors is that if you can create a character for the stage and keep that character fresh for at least 6 months that means you're doing the show eight times a week.
As an actor you can't build up proper relationships with the people you work with, because after six months, you're done.
With acting, you have to depend on somebody else to decide if you are allowed to work. You can spend weeks and months when you are not acting at all.