The only way to silence a room that's laughing at you is to sort of take over.

To me, one of the main things that a director does is create the tone of his movie.

I just pick the best roles that are left over, and they usually aren't the heterosexual, leading-man, non-drug-addict parts. And once you get into doing them, people know you do them.

I mean I don't think it got me interested in acting. I think it might be what makes it so that I can have the idea of the variety of people in the world, different incomes. That helps. When you're going to play someone it's interesting and nice to see experiences that aren't like yours. But there's always the remarkable similarity of all people.

Even a good politician, someone who is very ambitious, chooses not to see trouble.

If you go in and audition for roles rather than just be offered them, then you kind of get a chance to kind of discover that you can do something that you didn't think you could do.

I still consider myself a young actor, I'm 34 I still view it as the beginning of my career. You can get infatuated with acting in a way that makes you less an actor than an acting appreciator.

I always think change is important in a character. The most dynamic choices that you can make for a character are always the best ones.

I don't spend a lot of time judging anyone I play. Even if their function in the script is to be the villain, I concentrate on what their perspective of the events is. Not even to justify them.

Who would I least want to hang out with? Probably John Lotter. I guess I have a place of understanding for everyone I've played.

I like to work as an actor. Not just for money, but because I really enjoy acting.

Four hours of makeup, and then an hour to take it off. It's tiring. I go in, I get picked up at two-thirty in the morning, I get there at three. I wait four hours, go through it, ready to work at seven, work all day long for twelve hours, and get it taken off for an hours, go home and go to sleep, and do the same thing again.

If all the circumstances of acting are made to easy, then there's no grain of sand to make the pearl.

I frequently gravitate toward characters that have some urgency or soul.

If I want to keep working as an actor, I'm going to become a comedian who does fart jokes.

Words are words, but the way an actor says them, the way it's framed, puts you either in the world that looks a lot like ours or one that doesn't seem a lot like ours, one that can be farcical or one that can't.