As somebody who makes his living in the movie business and wants to contribute to it, I think that the best chance I have of doing that is just consistently working with great directors.
There are people who just collect a bunch of footage and then edit it later. You definitely feel more protected when a director is moving on when you’ve actually felt something happen and you know they’re watching intently.
I was never that much a focus of interest that I became a ‘thing’ at an earlier point in my career. I’m aware of having become a ‘thing’ now, which doesn’t give me a lot of pleasure.
If your movies don’t perform, they just stop calling you.
I found myself getting more publicly shy when the gala events and big crowds started. Some people embrace it. To me, it’s not worth enough to risk my private life being public.
As actors, we react to the material that’s out there, and I probably just react more strongly to things that I feel will have some social value.
I’m becoming far more interested in just functionality and making sure my body is as strong as it can be so I can swing my kids around and not worry about aches and pains.
The first time I smoked was at home with my mother and stepfather; they were like, If you are going to do this, we’d rather you did this with us.
Any moron with a pack of matches can start a fire. Raining down sulfur takes a huge level of endurance. Mass genocide is the most exhausting activity one can engage in, next to soccer.
When you have a child, your relationship with every child in the world changes. It’s like you’re in a club you didn’t know existed before a child came into your life. I believe you should make the world more beautiful for all children in any way that you can.
I believe a solid, really strong middle-class is the key to making the country in the best way.
As a struggling actor, youre not looking for parts that define you; youre just looking for work.
And you know, we were talking about American identity, and where we’ve come from and where we are and where we’re headed. We knew that we wanted to have a hopeful ending and we wanted it to be pro-community, and a pro-democracy type of movie.
For a lot of actors, our biggest fear is that we’re going to start talking about things we don’t fully understand and sound like idiots.
If Brad Pitt walked down the street, cars would crash into each other. I’m really lucky not to have to deal with that.
It’s pretty easy to kind of lose your way. Having kids is really helpful. They kind of disabuse you of the notion of your greatness pretty quickly.
Generally, the bigger the budget, the less interesting the characters become.
Still, the change is nearly indescribable – going from total obscurity to walking down a street in New York and having everybody turn and look; to feel the temperature of a room change when I walked in.
Now that I have kids, I’m probably more overprotective than I’ve ever been. My wife’s nickname for me is ‘red alert.’ I sometimes check just to see if the kids are breathing. But I try not to be a helicopter parent.
It was shameful and embarrassing that there were two years in a row without a single actor of color nominated. That’s insane.
The values that I have are the values I was raised with, from where I’m from, which is a middle-class place. So that informs everything about me, my politics and all that stuff. I mean, politically, I vote against my own self-interest at every election. I actively ask these people to raise my taxes.