If you have the opportunity to meet someone as an actor, it’s just great fodder for you. It’s wonderful source stuff that we die for.
That’s where humour lives for me. In the body. The Steve Martin kind of stuff or Jim Carrey, that’s what I like. I’ve always felt that’s what I would like to do.
Never let anyone know what you are thinking.
I have a life and do a lot of things, and so far my work has been my life. If I was a painter no one would question me about my age. I’m an artist, I hate saying that.
We live in a world where the more you’re working, the more things you do. It’s a workaday world.
Being the actors of the craft, the trade, one of the big things you do and you learn is about repeating. There is something to the repeats. I think that is part of what is healthy to young actors. Get out and learn something just through doing that, repeating.
There are a lot of roles in Shakespeare, basically. If I feel that the script is a movie, I would be interested in doing any role of Shakespeare’s.
Our ability to manufacture fraud now exceeds our ability to detect it.
I want to be a great actor someday, and I’ve decided there’s no use philosophizing; the only way is to work at my craft.
When my mother got home from work, she would take me to the movies. It was her way of getting out, and she would take me with her. I’d go home and act all the parts. It had a tremendous influence on my becoming an actor.
It would be hard to play a character you don’t like – for me anyway – or can’t find something in them to like.
I’ve always been in the theater. I’ve always gone to it. That’s been my way to cope. Early on in my career, I remember running – fleeing – to the theater as a way of coping with all the meshugaas that was going on for me.
You never open your mouth until you know what the shot is.
I do believe, and I will always believe, that Shakespeare on film is really something that should be tried more often because it is an opportunity to take the humanity that Shakespeare writes into characters and express it.
I’ve often said there’s two kinds of actors. There’s a more gregarious type and the shy type.
I am more alive in the theater than anywhere else, but what I take into the theater I get from the streets.
It’s not personal, it’s strictly business.
When I was younger, I would go to auditions to have the opportunity to audition, which would mean another chance to get up there and try out my stuff, or try out what I learned and see how it worked with an audience, because where are you gonna get an audience?
Be careful how you judge people, most of all friends. You don’t sum up a man’s life in one moment.
What’s this thing that gets between us and Shakespeare?