I think it's quite natural as an actor to compare yourself to how well other people are doing and how other people might've played that role you auditioned for. There's a lot of comparison you can do as an actor, which is natural, because it's a competitive industry. However, we're all individuals, so you can only ever be yourself.
Quite honestly I never had a desire to be an actor. I tell people, 'I did not choose acting; acting chose me.' I never grew up wanting to be an actor. I wanted to play football.
Being able to do lead roles in pictures or onstage or whatever it is that you're doing in acting is obviously what you strive for because you want to better yourself as an actor and you want to better yourself as a person as well. But that does come with a lot of responsibility and a great deal of weight.
For me, acting was a way of taking destructive energy and doing something productive with it, and in that way it was quite a life saver.
I had to go in and do the work of toning [invented "historical" bits] down in order to make them fit [in Lincoln in the Bardo]. It's like if you're an actor and you're always overacting, well, you're a bad actor. But if you're an actor who subdues yourself to the extent that's necessary, then you're really acting.
Acting is something I appreciate, and I think it's been an amazing experience. But I'm not passionate about acting the way you probably should be to call yourself an actor.
Acting is reacting... there's a magic when you're working with another actor. With voice acting, you're doing it alone, all in your head. So, you have to re-create that essence by yourself. It's not necessarily more difficult. It's just a different set of skills.
I'm not really sure if I have anything that inspires me. I think what goes into my work is everything beforehand that I do with my dad. He teaches me acting, and I think maybe without him it would be pretty hard. I started acting for fun, really, because my dad's an actor and my sister's an actor, so I started doing it and it was normal. But it got places really fast, and I started doing feature film auditions and stuff.
Quite honestly I never had a desire to be an actor. I tell people, I did not choose acting; acting chose me. I never grew up wanting to be an actor. I wanted to play football. In about 9th grade an English teacher told me I had a talent to act. He said I should audition for a performing arts high school so I did on a whim. I got accepted.
Sometimes I'm doing a big movie, or sometimes I'm doing a TV show, but as an actor, it's almost the same thing for me. If I'm doing action, or comedy, or something more heartfelt, it's a different approach, but it's all acting for me.
I wasn't good at anything at school, and acting was the only thing that I really loved doing and was interested in. It was kind of like my only option. For me to get opportunities in acting is so fortunate. I found something I loved doing and wasn't terrible at; it was quite nice.
You can't tell young people what to do. You can't tell 'em because they'll look at you and say, 'Well, how can you tell me not to do that when you were there doing it yourself?' Or supposedly were doing it yourself. I think you must let everyone live their life the way they have to.
I had said bye-bye to acting, in a way, but once an actor, always an actor. Life has got other plans for me. Like, I did not want to be an actor - I wanted to be an architect or astronaut - and 'Daddy' happened, and the rest is history.
There are a few pretty fundamental differences. In voice acting, if you are doing game recording, for the most part you are going to be by yourself in a studio. With game voice acting you are constructing everything for yourself pretty much. You're thinking about what the other characters could be doing, trying to imagine the scene, you're constructing the entire environment for yourself.
How you look is part of what acting is, but the way I look at it, every actor is a character actor. Someone once told me at a casting, 'You're a character actor in a leading man's body,' and I can live with that.
Identity is a very difficult thing in the theatre. As an actor said to me one day, 'What are we doing today?' when we were doing a workshop. And I said, 'Oh, just be yourself'. And he said to me, 'I don't know who that is, I'm an actor'. And I begin to realise in fact that we seek identity because we're told we should have one, but I wonder whether it's necessary.