My tendency as an actor is, when there’s a certain energy, I feel a challenge to match it, to come up to that plate and play on the same level.
I’m fiercely protective of my privacy.
I’m much more of a kid now than I was when I was a kid. I was the kind of kid who was valedictorian, a straight-A student. My mom used to say, “Please stop studying and get outside.”
As an actor, you’re naked emotionally; you’re revealing yourself emotionally.
I kind of knew it wasn’t going to be until my 30s that I really hit my stride as an actor.
Unfortunately, ‘chick flick’ has become a term to describe most movies that I don’t even like. They’re these movies that, yes, have women in them but they really don’t reflect who women are, and there’s something kind of silly or shallow or gossipy about them.
For me, I never, never, from the moment I started acting, had a desire to be famous.
I always had challenges when I was younger, because I looked so young but sounded older.
I generally make a sort of playlist for my iPod for whatever project I’m doing.
It’s not often that the idea of continuing something for a potentially long period of time sounds exciting to me, because I really am a gypsy by nature.
I think the scariest thing to me is to think that somebody would only associate me with one character and that that’s all that I would get to play.
You can’t not be happy around penguins. You’re unfortunately happy and cold but the happiness makes up for the coldness.
I don’t have a favorite genre. I mean, I always sort of base it on instinct. And it does seem to be that after I finish something that is very dramatic, I end up inevitably wanting to do a comedy or something like that.
I started acting when I was 13, so acting has been, with great fortune, my job since I could get a job.
The interesting thing with acting, actually, is that you get to be so many different people that you get to do so much research on so many different things that I’ve learned so much about brain surgery and about astrophysicist-type of things and traveling to amazing parts of the world.
I always wanted to be one of those people who were good at many, many things, but from a very early age, I fell in love with acting.
I always think a good sports movie is emblematic in the same way that a great Greek tragedy really has a certain kind of structure, or a Shakespearean play if you’re looking at a comedy or a tragedy, is that these are the heights and depths of human emotion.
I feel that’s the richest gift that’s ever been given to me: I get to do what I love. And it’s a really brutal business, and no matter how successful you are you hear “No” more than “Yes.”
I think that once somebody sees something, or feels it in the consciousness of society, it starts to allow change for other people.
I think maybe because I moved a lot in my childhood, I’m a little bit of a gypsy by nature.
It’s interesting how when you walk into a room in LA there’s a sense of what you walk in, as is sort of what you can do. So I spent a lot of time choosing different things to hopefully show people that maybe that’s not the case.