A Quote by John Cleese
Basil Fawlty was an easy character for me. For some reason, portraying a mean, uptight, incompetent bully comes naturally to me.
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The repeat run of Fawlty Towers (BBC2) drew bigger audiences than ever and deservedly so. Statistical surveys reveal that only the television critic of the Spectator is incapable of seeing the joke, which is that Basil Fawlty has the wrong temperament to be a hotel proprietor, just as some other people have the wrong temperament to be television critics.
Carla Lane's 'Butterflies' seemed to be on in our house at all times when I was a kid, as did 'The Good Life.' But it was 'Fawlty Towers that made me really sit up for the first time. Basil's incandescent rage made me howl.
I find it rather easy to portray a businessman. Being bland, rather cruel and incompetent comes naturally to me.
Illy [Ray Illingworth] had the man-management skills of Basil Fawlty
Any character, for me, always comes together in the hair, makeup, and wardrobe. Shoes especially. For some reason, shoes really do it for me because they help me figure out how the character walks.
Walt Disney got away with portraying me in the light that they were portraying me in. I have always been a fighter, so... But I have no regrets, man. It's just like God brought me through the drugs, I know he'll bring me through this.
Twitter and Facebook and all of this stuff is, to me, I mean it's, for some reason - I'm probably not the youngest person using it. But for some reason, it works very well. I'm setting records.
[Barack] Obama is an incompetent. He is an incompetent president.He doesn't know what he's doing, he's out campaigning all day long, he talking about me like he knows me. I don't know him, he doesn't know me.
The process of playing a character as dark as Omar Saeed Sheikh is disturbing. So you have to mentally also be in that psyche, that state of mind. So, it was not easy. I was trying to cultivate a lot of anger and hatred in me while portraying him, because that's what I read and heard about him.
My first time alone in Spain playing basketball - that kind of made me tougher, especially for my character and my personality. It's not easy when you're alone. Some nights you have bad games or bad days and it's not easy. I think that is the one thing that changed me, to make me a better person, a tougher guy.
'Fawlty Towers' was a huge influence on me. I mean, it was so slapstick, too. 'Are You Being Served?' was on 15 times a day, it seemed like, and I loved it.
Tommie Aaron taught me how to have a good attitude, to be easy going and not get uptight.
I've always been accused by my detractors of some sort of moral failure, cowardice, or even lack of humanity by not portraying the human form. I respond that I do better by portraying traces of character and intentions of human volition that no mug or body shot can ever exude.
My mother didn't let me see color films. I saw a lot of black-and-white films. The first time I saw Basil Rathbone, I was completely taken. To me, that was the epitome of great acting, was Basil Rathbone - not only in Sherlock Holmes, but the Sheriff of Nottingham, and all the terrible characters he had to play alongside Errol Flynn.
We're selfish to some degree, that's not a criticism and it doesn't mean that we are all narcissists. But in any situation our minds naturally evolve to what's in it for me? How does this affect me? Can this benefit me? Can this harm me? Then we might move on from that and have a more altruistic point of view about things but that's almost always our initial response.
A bully has no respect for a weakling and the way to stop a bully is not to be weak. The way to stop a bully from ever being a bully is to say: "I'm as strong as you. Anything you do to me, I can do to you." We are going for nuclear and conventional disarmament but we're going about it in the right way.
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