A Quote by Cobie Smulders
I like to challenge myself. Whether that's on television or film or on stage, that's what I'm going to go for.
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Plays are literature: the word, the idea. Film is much more like the form in which we dream - in action and images (Television is furniture). I think a great play can only be a play. It fits the stage better than it fits the screen. Some stories insist on being film, can't be contained on stage. In the end, all writing serves to answer the same question: Why are we alive? And the form the question takes - play, film, novel - is dictated, I suppose, by whether its story is driven by character or place.
Whether it's animated, whether it's live-action, whether it's Broadway, whether it's television, a musical is a musical is a musical. So, pretty much you approach the songs in pretty much the same way. The difference might be that in a film you have a close up. On stage you don't. So there are more songs on the stage because the songs are kind of the close up.
My first job was television. I got to where I wanted to go, but through a little bit of a detour. When I first started working in film and television, I hated myself - I didn't like what I was doing at all. All I could think of was, 'I'm overacting. Be smaller.' I started to do that, but that was not fun. I felt confined doing film and TV.
I got to a point where I thought, now I have a choice. I can stay in theatre, or I can challenge myself and give this a go. And I want to challenge myself. I like to scare myself.
I still think of myself as a stage actor. When I do film and television I try to implement what I was taught to do in theatre, to try to stretch into characters that are far from myself.
I have always been of the mind that good work is good work, whether performed on stage, on television or in film and, like any reasonable actor, I keep my options open.
When you go through a tunnel - you're going on a train - you go through a tunnel, the tunnel is dark, but you're still going forward. Just remember that. But if you're not going to get up on stage for one night because you're discouraged or something, then the train is going to stop. Everytime you get up on stage, if it's a long tunnel, it's going to take a lot of times of going on stage before things get bright again. You keep going on stage, you go forward. EVERY night you go on stage.
I've always felt kind of safe on stage, protected. I've talked to other performers about this and they feel the same things, particularly in the live arena. I never get nervous going on stage to do a play. Doing film or television I'll have more butterflies.
The goal with me, and the way I challenge myself as an actor, is to go from genre to genre. I like that. A lot of actors always challenge themselves. But for me the challenge lies not only in getting better, but going from drama to comedy to action or whatever the case may be, and having a wide array of movies in terms of my filmography.
I grew up doing plays - I went to a stage school after school - and it's always something that I've wanted to do, but, in a weird way, if you do television and film and you didn't go to drama school and don't have a theatrical background, it's hard to get your foot in the door. In the same way that it is for theater actors to get into television and film. There's a weird prejudice that goes both ways.
In the past, if you did film, you couldn't do stage, and if you did film, you certainly didn't do television. You had to pick what you wanted to be. Now it seems like we can bounce around, not only between genres, but between mediums, and I like that. I like change and I like a good story.
I like the challenge of trying different things and wondering whether it's going to work or whether I'm going to fall flat on my face.
In the modern media age we are rarely surprised by what we see. Whether it's on television or film or in the theatre, everything is so advertised, so trailed, that most entertainment is merely what you thought it was going to be like.
Film and television are just different. Film is cool because it's a complete package. You know the beginning, middle, and end. You can plan it out more, which I like. But with television you get a new script every week, so it's constantly a mystery as to what you're going to be doing.
I like to talk to the crowd on stage. I don't like going to a concert and feeling like the people on stage don't care whether or not I'm there.
Let me just tell you how thrilling it really is, and how, what a challenge it is, because in 1988 the question is whether we're going forward to tomorrow or whether we're going to go past to the - to the back!
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