You get to keep acting on the feelings you had just moments before. You don't have to psych yourself up for the scene. You can just go off what you were already feeling.
Theratre is not like like in film and TV, where you have to stop and go back and keep redoing the same three pages for two hours. You get to go through the whole 80 pages of the script, which is incredible. You get to keep acting on the feelings you had just moments before. You don't have to psych yourself up for the scene. You can just go off what you were already feeling.
I had just come off my third consecutive failed television series. I had sworn off doing TV for a while. I was going to go to New York, sublet an apartment, and find my soul again. Before I got on the plane, my agent sent me the script for 'Psych.' I read it on the plane and realised it had a lot of potential.
That one long scene in the Leftovers I have with David Gulpilil was seven pages long. When we finished it, Mimi Leder said, "I thought you were gonna do this in bits and pieces. You just did the whole thing." And I literally couldn't remember the scene. It wasn't that I was in a trance. I said, "Just keep shooting takes until you see what you want." In 48 years of acting, which is also how long I've been married, that had never happened to me.
I hope I can keep acting because I love it. It's like a crazy, addictive rollercoaster... it takes you up and down, up and down, up and down but you just don't want to get off. I just want to keep challenging myself... finding new roles, trying out new things and learning.
Once I moved to Chicago and started trying to get acting jobs, I just tended to book more things that were comedically based than anything else. I never had the preconceived notion, 'I will be a comedic actor.' I just thought, 'I'll go into acting and see what kind of work I can get.'
Once I moved to Chicago and started trying to get acting jobs, I just tended to book more things that were comedically based than anything else. I never had the preconceived notion, "I will be a comedic actor." I just thought, "I'll go into acting and see what kind of work I can get."
I had never done Shakespeare before, but I don't think you can be an actor and not do it. There were moments when I thought, I'm just not going to be able to pull this off.
To make real friends you have to put yourself out there. Sometimes people will let you down, but you can't let that stop you. If you get hurt, you just pick yourself up, dust off your feelings, and try again.
I always knew where I needed to go but I sometimes had a problem getting there, so I had to work harder at it. Once in a while I'd wanna take off the blouse and heels because I'd get that "I just wanna be a guy" feeling I had when growing up.
To me, acting used to be just, 'Get my face out there, get girls, make a little bit of money, make my mom proud.' It was just like sports. But there were moments in 'Moonlight' that I really felt like I had to know why he is the way he is. Or just people in general - why this person walks around with a frown on their face instead of a smile.
I usually just pick a genre of movie that I feel like saluting and then go off and come up with something that I can sort of pay homage to. That's the great thing about our show is we've sort of created a landscape for 'Psych' where we're kind of allowed to go off and give shout-outs to movies that we love, genres that we love.
You don't psych yourself up for these things, you do them... I'm acting for the audience, not for myself, and I do it as directly as I can.
I used to psych myself up before the show and now I do the complete opposite: I psych myself down. It's 12:30 at night, you don't want some guy yelling at you. You want some guy just talking to you.
When I'm not acting, I do like to take a year off at a time, at least if I can, just in order to keep acting exciting - otherwise I get bored very quickly.
In order for me to get right, I had to go back to Memphis, I had to close myself in, get in the studio, lock in, and just think about everything before all the ice, before the money, before everything, and just vent.
To be able to have that self-respect for yourself and just that feeling of, OK, I did what I could, just stay true to yourself.If you feel that this is something that's valid and you should go out there and win, then push through it no matter what the outcome is. Just know that nine times out of 10 that no matter whether you were right or you were wrong, the NFL is a business.