For a long time, I refused to wear jeans. I liked high-waisted pants, but jeans made me feel like I wasn't being unique. Even now, I won't wear the skinny-jeans style, because most people wear those - they have to be baggier, boyfriend-looking, or sort of like a mom jean. I'm real funny that way.
I hate pants. This is something I have inherited from my father. He despised pants, and my mother was never allowed to wear them at home. We're talking about a different time period now, when the man was much more the ruler of the house. But I still feel that way, and neither my mother nor Maria is allowed to go out with me in pants.
How many times have people said to me, "I think those pants are incredible, but I could never wear them." Well, why not? What's so different about these pants? I wear very classic things, but maybe with a little change here or there.
My father was very strict with me, and I kept seeing a disparity between their freedom and my lack of it, or how I had all the responsibilities and they had none. And the Catholic Church, all of the rules, and why did I have to wear a dress when they could wear pants? I would say to my dad: 'Will Jesus love me less if I wear pants? Am I going to hell?'
As a person, I am still very middle class. People don’t realise these things. Most of the black suits that I wear are the same. All the designer clothes I have are actually from my films. I don’t dream of Rolls Royce and things like that… People are kind enough to me to give me the nicest things in life, but it doesn’t mean that I’m used to them.
My mama never wore a pair of pants when I was growing up, and now that's all she wears. It was so funny for me when I first started seeing Mama wear pants. It was like it wasn't Mama. Now I've bought her many a pantsuit because she just lives in them.
I'm from Texas, so we used to wear our pants starched down like a cowboy. So when I got to New York, to New Jersey, everybody was laughing at me like, 'Look at his pants! His pants could stand up by themselves!'
Something that's very painful for me is when people wear pants that are too short.
She'll really tell me [what she thinks]. Like today I'm wearing brown suede pants, and she said, 'I don't like your pants.' But then she'll say, `You've got to wear these shoes.' Or 'That's so pretty, Mom. Wear that.' She's got a great eye.
You see those guys wearing baggy pants, descendants of the parachute pants, wearing an odd, weird Frankenstein haircut. It all comes out of Peter Lorre.
It's funny: most people who recognize me on the subway and stuff - it's much more they think of me as a funny guy. I get much more of people telling me how much I make them laugh, actually. Which is nice.
I've been caught in parachute pants. And on my high school yearbook, they used the wrong picture. They were supposed to use the picture of me with a nice suit on. They used me with my collar flipped up, in a fuchsia and white striped shirt. I blame Prince and Michael Jackson in the Eighties for that.
Most days I don't care what I wear. You'll find me in yoga pants, a T-shirt, and sneakers almost every day. My job is to wear something nice when I work, so I enjoy doing it then. But when I don't have to, I'd rather just wear something comfortable.
In a funny way, acting, to me, is all make-believe, even if the film has unicorns in it or is a normal movie that can be set in real-life time. I'm still imagining that I'm a different character, so it's all, in a funny way, like fantasy.
What that book does for me is give me the tools in the same way that I had the tools when I learned the regular scales or the alphabet. If you give me the tools, the syntax, and the grammar, it still doesn't tell me how to write Ulysses.
I never thought, 'I'm going to learn how to be funny now!,' and I'm still surprised when other people think I'm funny. I just learned to make jokes as a way of moving through the world. It helps me deal with all sorts of discomfort and boredom.