I've had a chance to really stretch and do a lot of different genres. When I started acting, my whole focus and intention was to work as a stage actor in a company where you're asked to different roles - do a comedy, do a tragedy, etc. I haven't had any reservations about jumping from one type of genre to another.
When I started acting, my whole focus and intention was to work as a stage actor in a company where you're asked to different roles - do a comedy, do a tragedy, etc. I haven't had any reservations about jumping from one type of genre to another.
I started in comedy when I first started as an actor on stage and doing improvisational theater and stuff like that. So a lot of people who know me know that sort of side of me. But I got the roles that I got as an young actor kind of steered me in a different direction, which were, at times, darker characters. And so comedy was not something that came easy for people to think of my in those terms.
You learn so much from making mistakes, not even necessarily mistakes that I've made, a lot of the time the films just don't work out because it's a really difficult process. And sometimes there's a certain person underlining process. But I've had an opportunity to work on all different types of films and I have had a lot of opportunities to stretch myself in different ways and now is the time where I get to try and figure out out the roles that I can really play well and play them well.
I had been asked to start going out for roles here and there throughout my career, but I know that acting is a hard thing; it takes a lot of work, and I was traveling. I didn't have the time to really focus on it, so I really waited for the right project to come along.
With repertory, you had to play all these different characters. The range of roles is really what I fell in love with, every night getting to become somebody different. That was my idea of acting, getting to be part of the company and a family.
As an actor you get to play different roles and genres. I feel that it pleases and satisfies me to do different genres as it can get repetitive.
My dream as an actor growing up was always to challenge myself to different genres, different roles, and it's actually rare that an actor's given that opportunity to do that.
In my career, I've had kind of a strange trajectory as an actor. I started out doing movies and theater and stuff, but then I had a terrible problem with stage fright as an actor on stage, and I quit stage acting for a long, long time.
As an actor, I'm not sure what I had to offer the world of tragedy and comedy when I was 21. I hadn't lived a whole lot. By my middle 30s, you know, I had been knocked around a little bit.
An actor is an impersonator; he plays many different roles. If you played the same role all the time, God - that'd be a boring career. When you take on different roles and become a different person, that's called acting... It's a challenge.
I never wanted to stay in one genre; I never wanted to be pigeon-holed or defined as the actor who only worked in one genre. I want to be able to work in all different genres. For me it's fun, and that's how I grow as an actor.
Getting to do different genres of movies means you're gonna have different types of situations. So I want to try and do every type of genre there is out there.
You gotta understand, there weren't a whole lot of roles for Hispanics in the Eighties, so comedy was really the way I could really feed myself and eventually feed my family. I was an actor who learned to be a comic, and it's cool to come back and get back into acting - move forward in the direction I started out to do in the beginning.
I had no intention of replacing Arnold [Schwarzenegger]. There were a few things that made me want to do the movie. They were the script which had a different direction to it, and it was a chance to do a very different Quaid. I didn't read the short story until I went to college.Reading the story had a different effect on me of how I pictured him to be and the tone of the story was different. In the story, he's a bit more of an everyman.
It's about... my only strategy I've ever had in my career is to do as many different types of roles as possible, as many different types of genres. It keeps the fire in my belly.
I've been really fortunate to be able to do different kinds of films in different scales, different genres, different kinds of roles, and that is important to me.