I tend to get comfortable with the dialogue and find out who the person is in the script and try to hit that. People are sort of independent of their occupations and their pastimes. You don't play a politician or a fireman or a cowboy - you just play a person.
What I mostly do is take the script, analyse the hell out of it, see what's in there, see what kind of person I'm dealing with, and then forget I'm playing a father and just play a person who exemplifies all those things.
I was brought up not to be selfish or self-centered. So if you play somebody who isn't so lovable, you can play that person and no one will turn on you. I don't want to play that person in real life. Because then people won't like me so much.
I'd rather play with 10 people and just get penalized all the way until we have to do something else rather than play with 11 when I know that right now that person is not sold out to be a part of this team.
Anytime a person can play the blues, he has a soul and he has a 'lift' to play anything else he wants to play. It's sort of like the foundation to a building.
You get a chance to play, you get a little more comfortable out there on the court, and you just try to make the most out of the time you get.
With it all independent I feel like we're doing it one person at a time turning people into believers one person at a time. Just that good old-fashioned grind, get out there, touch the people.
The only negative thing is that I got into acting thinking, "One day I'll be a cowboy, the next day I'll be an astronaut. Maybe I'll be a fireman." It seems that I'm destined to play smart people in suits. I'd rather have that than no niche.
A lot of times, in film and TV, they just want you to play yourself. But, when you're someone who's more of a character actor, you get to experience what it feels like to play a bunch of different kinds of people. I find it more invigorating than challenging. I definitely trust the writers to give me the material that I will take and turn into the person that I'm playing.
I know I play with a lot of passion, but from the outside looking in, people say, 'He's passive. Doesn't play hard.' And others say, 'It just comes easy to him. He's smooth.' That's just how I play. Always been the same person.
When I was a kid, we used to play this thing called 'the writing game' with our father. My brother and I would play it - where first person writes a sentence, and the second person writes a sentence, and the third person writes a sentence, and so on until you get bored and have to go to bed.
I always tend to see, right after reading the script, the character and how I want to play it. I guess that's sort of most of the work, preparing for the role, but almost the creation of the character seems to go on as I read through the script.
That person who's going to a concert for a nostalgic reason, we're not really going to placate. We still play three or four hits every night. Now, we don't play them like the record. We try to find new ways to do it.
I guess I'd rather be comfortable and play well because I'm comfortable than to get recognition and play someplace where I wouldn't be comfortable and wouldn't enjoy myself.
I like to investigate all different kinds of people, I guess, and find out what makes them who they are, and try to be honest in the portrayal, and truthful, and find out how to understand that person, how to communicate that person's experience.
One of the things I loved about working on 'Portal' was that we'd get emails from people saying, 'I love to play first-person shooters but my girlfriend won't play them with me. But I got her to play 'Portal' and she had a blast.'
As an actor, you can't play a flashback; you can't play someone's memory. You just have to play each circumstance as if it was real and understand that person's point of view.