If I don’t get food in my mouth, I’m still happy. If my pants are round my ankles, as long as I don’t get arrested for indecent exposure, I’m happy. I’m worried about keeping my hair, not how it’s combed.
I mean, I enjoy my work as an actor. But to make a difference in people’s lives through advocacy and through supporting research – that’s the kind of privilege that few people will get, and it’s certainly bigger than being on TV every Thursday for half an hour.
When you’re a short actor you stand on apple boxes, you walk on a ramp. When you’re a short star everybody else walks in a ditch.
When I was younger, I was always described as happy-go-lucky.
The thing that brings people to wail at a wall, or face Mecca, or to go to church, is a search for that feeling of purity.
The ‘Rescue Me’ gig was a unique opportunity to play a character – a misanthropic, angry guy – who was so contrary to how people think of me.
I have no choice about whether or not I have Parkinson’s. I have nothing but choices about how I react to it. In those choices, there’s freedom to do a lot of things in areas that I wouldn’t have otherwise found myself in.
I wouldn’t have wanted to miss the opportunity to make those three films that didn’t do well. They were really important to me, and the things I learned doing them were important to me.
I’m also very proud to be a part of a trilogy of films that, if they do nothing else, allow people to check their problems at the door, sit down and have a good time.
Control is illusory. No matter what university you go to, no matter what degree you hold, if your goal is to becomes master of your own destiny, you have more to learn.
My notion of spirituality was different than it is now, but even if I’d been the most fundamentalist of believers, I would have assumed that God had better things to do than arbitrarily smite me with shaking palsy.
Happiness is a decision.
You know what I want? The answer is, I truly don’t know what I want. I don’t want to do a television series. I want to do dramas as well as comedies, but I have no idea what kind or in what order. Just give me the chance at them.
The moment I understood this – that my Parkinson’s was the one thing I wasn’t going to change – I started looking at the things I could change, like the way research is funded.
I’m kind of private and I keep things inside a lot, but it’s been so wonderful to realize that people care about you in a very deep way and that there is some bond between an actor and his audience. I don’t even know how to describe that feeling.
I’ve learned some exciting things – mostly, that people really want to help each other; and that, if you can lay out a vision for them – and that vision is sincere and genuine – they’ll get interested.
If you asked my kids to describe me, they’d go through a whole list of words before even thinking about Parkinson’s. And honestly, I don’t think about it that much either. I talk about it because it’s there, but it’s not my totality.
No, I got a GED in my 30s. My kids know that I never stop learning, and they know I love reading. I have books overflowing everywhere. I am current on today’s events and I read the paper every day, and we talk about it, so they see that appetite.
So I never spend a lot of time analyzing why people respond to my work. But I think that it’s just the joy, a passion for life, that I think has always been in my characters. Beyond that, I’m just grateful for it.
By 21, I was earning six figures a week. By 23, I had a Ferrari. It was nuts.