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There's something magical about theater. You can live the character every single day to the point where you become that person.

I've always remembered something Sanford Meisner, my acting teacher, told us. When you create a character, it's like making a chair, except instead of making someting out of wood, you make it out of yourself. That's the actor's craft - using yourself to create a character.

There are characters in movies who I call 'film characters.' They don't exist in real life. They exist to play out a scenario. They can be in fantastic films, but they are not real characters; what happens to them is not lifelike.

An actor must interpret life, and in order to do so must be willing to accept all the experiences life has to offer. In fact, he must seek out more of life than life puts at his feet.

That's one of the things that's great about acting. You can play all the different aspects of a human being.

When I was in theater I was forever trying to inhabit a space which puts yourself under the microscope as an actor and your personality and your take on life, but actually through another portal of a character.

Actors are there to represent the human condition back to itself. It's never about the actor. It's about the content. That's what I strive for in my work.

Since I've worked in film and television for so long, I've acquired the ability to let the version of the characters that lives in my mind make way for the living, breathing humans who are going to play them on screen. If you cast it right - and casting is about 80% of directing - they will eventually replace or exceed the imaginary image.

For film and games, there is now a fantastic method of actors portraying characters which don't necessarily look like themselves. And yet you've still got the heart and soul of the performance.