It would drive me crazy if I picked roles with the goal of being a leading man. You never know what you're getting into when you sign onto a project, and more times than not, the characters that are close to the leading man are more interesting and more fun to play.
I'm sure my agents would like me to play leading roles, and I guess I should, but I'm more interested in the character parts. They're more fun, challenging and interesting.
I've never thought of myself as a classic leading man. I'm a character actor who happens to play leading roles. Come on, look at me. I'm really Desperate Dan.
I'm quite lucky in that at certain angles I look all right, and at others I don't look so good, which enables me to play some leading roles and some stranger, more 'character'-type parts. I wouldn't say I'm the conventional handsome Hollywood leading man.
For me, the performance was always playing different people. And so when I got older, was no longer the romantic leading movie star, it became more and more interesting for me, the characters I played, you know?
Traditionally, women have a lot of different roles in society. It is very difficult to balance all these roles and at the same time to compete with men. A leading, successful woman has to put in much bigger efforts to be more competent and faster, more dynamic and organized, than a successful man.
I've always tried to stray towards characters who are way more faceted than your standard leading man role, and I've been fortunate to play some parts who have this awkward tension to them.
A leading role as a POC young man in a series on Netflix - to me personally it's more important than just getting a job.
That's something I would love to do - play leading roles and really hold it on my own in those leading roles.
The characters I tend to play are a little more interesting than the standard heroes. Romantic leads can be a little more straightforward, I guess. But it just seems to be the parts I get, I don't know what that says about me. I enjoy interesting characters and interesting people, I suppose.
Could you ever call me a 'leading man?' Not really. It's not that I don't want leading man roles, but there's only so many, and they want Tom Hanks, not me.
I have played some wonderful leading roles on stage and had the whole 'China Beach' years where I really played a leading man on that. That was a fun change for a character actor. But I'm perfectly happy going back to building my gallery of memorable character roles.
I just think of interesting roles to play. I guess that I have matured, I guess growing up and becoming a man, your taste in characters changes and I think I have become more interested in active characters as I have become less contemplative in my personal life. Things have become a little bit more interesting in the doing these days and less interesting in the thinking about the doing.
So this ["Grant MacLaren"] was a chance to sort of go back and do a more leading man. But instead of just solving crimes like a CSI show, this leading man is, like the other travelers, not who he appears.
I've never had any delusions about being a leading man, and it's not sour grapes to say that in the best films that I've always enjoyed, the cliched leading man type isn't a part of the picture.
Every actor will tell you it's so much more fun to play the bad guy because usually those characters are more complex and more broad and more interesting, and have more sides to them.
Character actors like Philip Seymour Hoffman and James Gandolfini have found themselves getting more and more leading roles because they are permitted to behave onscreen in ways that George Clooney and Matt Damon never could.