Quote

The frustrating part of being a movie actor is waiting in your trailer to do two takes of a scene you've prepared for two months.

As an actor, you arrive most of the time at the last minute. You arrive at the end of the process, but you don't realize it.

After I directed for the first time, I wanted to call every director I'd ever worked with and apologize. In television you are tasked with shooting 42 minutes, or whatever, in eight days. That's not a lot of time.

When you do a play, or even a movie, you have weeks to finesse your character. You really understand why they do what they do. In TV, you get new material weekly about your character.

An actor really suffers when the director isn't prepared because you start running out of time for the shoot and then have to do it fast.

In theatre, you've got to make the connect with your audience in the first three minutes. If you haven't, you know you've almost lost them.

Actors are conditioned to develop a system for expressing as much as they can in the shortest amount of time because you're going to get all cut up in a movie.

There's only so much you can do until you get on set and see the aesthetics of what you're dealing with. Then you see what the other players are giving to you. It's all about the transfer of energy between different actors.

The idea that you must treat actors a certain way in order to get a performance out of them kind of disturbs me, and it's disregarding what we do. Our job is to do our job.

When you're starting out as an actor, you keep raising the stakes. First, you just want to be a character who comes on stage and gets a laugh or two and exits. Just five minutes on a stage, not even Broadway. But every time you say your little prayer at night, you place more demands.