Acting offers me an outlet. Here is the perfect opportunity to spend fleeting moments becoming an entirely different person; to experience a character entirely unlike myself, but to also make such a character a part of me. There is no routine here; there is no boredom. How does one get bored of life?
I go through a whole process with the actors first, building and creating characters, then I encourage them to sort of live in that character when they're in the screen.
I love creating characters and becoming someone else entirely.
I like - it's not that I want to be someone different from me, but I suppose it partly is that. I love creating a character in a fantastical situation, like Dr. Frankenstein, like Leo Bloom, a little caterpillar who blossoms into a butterfly. I love that.
Stage is so important because it teaches me how to convey character with words - how to convey how a character reacts by the way they appear on stage. I can usually tell a playwright from someone who has never written for the stage. Did the character work? Did the dialogue reveal who the character is?
Building a character - nothing gives me more high than the process of exploring someone else's life on screen.
I think the idea of embodying the physical presence of a character is the same on stage and screen. There are just different levels of expression to keep in mind for each platform.
There is nothing, not a thing, like the process of creating a character for the stage - you can't get it anywhere else. Unless you're totally method and spend six months living your life like your character for a film, the theater is the place to get that intense acting experience.
The process of acting is no different [playing human or ape]. You're embodying the character. You're creating the psychology and the physicality. You're living the moment.
I love taking on challenges. I think one of the funnest things in acting is creating a character - wrapping yourself around a character and bringing him to life. I love a lot of different genres. I'm not a big horror guy by any means but I love the challenge. But the fifties and sixties is where I feel the most comfortable.
There are times when I am so unlike myself that I might be taken for someone else of an entirely opposite character.
Either I'm in the studio creating something, or I'm on stage doing some stand-up somewhere... or I'm creating a parody video flexing my pecs.
If you go on stage, or on TV, then there is an impetus that comes about to be a persona. A completely different character. But when you're someone like me, you don't want to have a persona. I want to be exactly who I am on stage.
I want to play so many different characters. I want to, like, understand so many different people, and psychoanalysis, everything. I love that about my job: getting into the character and understanding it and doing the psychoanalysis and creating that character.
I really love the process, with stage, of rehearsal, you get to create a character, and you have a beginning, a middle, and an end of story. And in television, you don't.
It's always nice when someone says that they don't realize it's me on screen, but it would be strange to enter a one story while thinking of another character I do, which is completely different.