I always thought Woody Harrelson is quite a persuasive guy. He’s the kind of guy who can call you up in the middle of the night and tell you, ‘Let’s all go get a donut!’ And you’re thinking, ‘It’s the middle of the night,’ but somehow you still get up and go get a donut.
In ‘Zombieland,’ it was such a freewheeling plot it almost didn’t matter what the characters were doing scene to scene as long as there was a consistent banter.
I don’t concern myself with thinking ahead to the finished product. I focus more specifically on what the character is experiencing. Once you relieve yourself of the very arbitrary and always punishing pressure of what an audience is expecting you to do, acting becomes a lot more fun and pure.
I guess the more serious you play something, if the context is funny, then it will be funny and it doesn’t really require you to be necessarily, explicitly humorous, or silly.
I’ve never had tastes of people my own age. All of my friends when I was 15 were in their 40s. I’m not actually mature, just very self-conscious around people my own age because I feel like I’m supposed to act the same way they act and I don’t know how.
I hate watching me. I hate watching me. It just makes me feel awful. I think, ‘I look stupid from that angle. I wish I didn’t let them put that shirt on me.’
I made the mistake of writing something very, very short about Obama for this website that I write fiction for, and my father told me never do that again. And he was right. I have nothing to add to a political conversation because it’s not my area.
I see writing and acting as different parts of the same continuum. Writing is better for intense emotion. If you’re very angry about something, you shouldn’t present it as strongly when you’re acting. But if you’re really angry and writing about it, that’s the best way to get it out and across.
As for environmentalism, I’m only an environmentalist by accident. I live in New York, so I bike, and the closest grocery store to me sells organic produce. I also shop with a book bag because I ride a bike, and it’s hard to carry the paper or plastic bags.
As an actor, you are in a unique position because you’re not only memorizing dialogue but really embodying it. You naturally feel the rhythm of good writing.
Any time you play a character for a long period of time, regardless of how close it is to you, it infiltrates your life. It’s impossible for it not to.
When you are in a live-action movie, you have so many more options to express yourself. You can use your body and your gestures and facial expressions. When you are doing an animated movie, you really only have your voice.
The ideal way to approach a character is to find something in yourself that relates in some way.
The scariest people to turn a movie over to are always the people who are drawing up the poster, because that’s the first impression it’s going to make. And very often it’s portraying a very different film from the one the actors actually did.
The movies that are really big, at least in my experience, oftentimes don’t have characters that I feel as personally connected to.
The only suggestions I get on my plays is to make them more of what they already are, and that’s wonderful.
It’s so nerve-wracking to be on a set. They’re the most stressful place in the world, because you’re making something permanent, and there are so many people relying on you in a lot of ways.
And I’m sure after Facebook it will be the little cameras that we have implanted into the palms of our hands and we’ll be debating whether we should get them, and then we’ll all get them.
Acting is a weird, kind of alienating job because you’re in an isolated place. Even if you’re working with a lot of other people, you’re kind of alienated. Actors say that a lot, and I kind of find that to be true.
Don’t be a hero, live to fight another day.