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Being an actor gives you a chance to play all kinds of roles, very moving and dramatic on one project, silly and girlish on another. That's the most interesting thing out this business, you get to keep reinventing yourself.

I am not an actor. Yes, every so often I appear on talk shows to promote something I've written, and I enjoy doing so because I have a lot of stories to tell, and I like making audiences laugh. But that's not acting. That's just me being me.

Part of the reason of being an actor is you like playing other people's lives and exploring all the psychologies in that and the emotions.

The thing about being an actor is that every new job is a new challenge. Sometimes you'll have a shot, and it doesn't work. Sometimes it'll work better than you expected.

Being an actor means asking people to look at you. I guess I accept that. But it's a profession in which the job is to show another world and other people. You may access it through bits of yourself, and your imagination and experience, but actually, in the end, you're not playing yourself.

Sometimes I think being an actor is like being a dog for a director; it's like they throw a stick, and you want to fetch it and bring it back to them. You want a pat on the head for it.

I think being a character actor is exciting in that it allows you to embody completely different things, whether it's through wild accents or a crazy bad guy or a drunken good guy.

The whole business of being an actor is to explore, from research to shooting to why you do it. You're trying to see why people do what they do and how it feels to do what they do.

To want to be an actor is enough - you don't need to tell us about it. The interesting person who comes with some life experience is always the person who is going to be chosen by me.

Being an actor helps me direct a little bit, when I do that, which I haven't been able to do that much, but I plan to in the future. There are a lot of reasons for that, but certainly because I feel like you know how to talk to actors, and you know what they need from you if you've been one yourself.