A Quote by Simon Bird

It's a very strange and quite terrifying experience to watch yourself on TV. I never like to do it with other people. — © Simon Bird
It's a very strange and quite terrifying experience to watch yourself on TV. I never like to do it with other people.
On stage you never watch yourself. You just experience it, and then you go home, and you feel pretty good if you gave a pretty good performance or crappy if you didn't. But in TV and film, you actually have to experience it while you're doing it, and then you have to watch it. And then when you're watching it, you watch it with a different sensibility than how you experienced it.
It's a very strange experience to watch yourself in a movie anyway. I most frequently don't do it, but if I was going to do it, I would do it in a private way, not at a public screening at a film festival, which is just an overwhelming experience.
It's quite strange, because off the field I'm quite shy, quiet, prefer to watch a bit of TV at home, but get me on the cricket field I like it all kicking off.
I am for peace and all kinds of ways because the total reality is that you never quite, at least in my experience, you never quite get to be peaceful in the profession that we have all chosen. It's a constant yearning, a constant reaching out for the unreachable. And so you never quite find peace within yourself. You are always questioning yourself and challenging yourself and feeling that you would fall short.
You can live a lifetime and, at the end of it, know more about other people than you know about yourself. You learn to watch other people, but you never watch yourself because you strive against loneliness. If you read a book, or shuffle a deck of cards, or care for a dog, you are avoiding yourself. The abhorrence of loneliness is as natural as wanting to live at all. If it were otherwise, men would never have bothered to make an alphabet, nor to have fashioned words out of what were only animal sounds, nor to have crossed continents - each man to see what the other looked like.
On TV, the children can watch people murdering each other, which is a very unnatural thing, but they can't watch two people in the very natural process of making love. Now, really, that doesn't make any sense, does it?
Most people just half-watch TV. They watch TV while they are doing many other things in the environment of their home. So, what they are doing goes through their ears as much as through their eyes. In television, the narrative and characters are in the foreground of everything, because you are watching TV as you do other stuff.
If you'd like to watch less television, try putting the remote away in a very inconvenient place and making yourself put it away every time you use it. If it's a big pain to turn on the TV and to change channels, you might find yourself drifting to other activities that will be more satisfying in the long run.
It's always tricky to watch yourself, always. When I first had to watch myself, it was really hard because I'd done quite a few plays and I've never seen myself. So I was professional but I'd never watched myself. So I was like hearing you know... I'm sure you guys are all much more familiar with that because everybody has a phone, and everyone's taking pictures of themselves and making movies of themselves. And so people are more accustomed to it now. So I had to get used to it because there's a lot to be learned, of course, as an actor. When you watch yourself, you learn a lot.
When you screen a film like 'The Missing Picture,' it is not like watching TV. Watching TV is very solitary. When you watch cinema, you watch it together, and you talk about it after the screening.
I'm not a huge TV person. I don't like having the noise when I'm doing other things unless I'm really lonely, and then I turn the TV on. But I do like to sit down and watch TV in the evenings.
It's very awkward to watch yourself on TV because I hate the sound of my voice. It's those moments where you're like, 'I do that?'
It's Crazy when I watch myself on TV. I'm always thinking like 'oh no how could I have done that' and I go crazy like seeing these little things that I do that probably other people would never even notice and stuff like that.
I'm not one of these people who says, 'I don't watch TV much.' Or looks down their nose at TV and they watch it for 20, 30 hours a week. I'm so busy. I work seven days a week that I just don't watch TV.
I really don't like watching myself and for the most part I will never watch myself. I worked with Kevin Smith on Yoga Hosers and I really respected the way that he directed. He told me, "It's very important to watch yourself." So he would direct by going, "Hey come over to the screen and watch this scene." And so it was very uncomfortable for me to have to watch myself but then he talked me through the process of that and it was very helpful.
I wanted to move between film and theater - I never felt like I fit into TV. And I'm very anti-TV, like, 'I'm never going to do TV,' but also, TV didn't want me either, so it was kind of perfect. And then, of course, cable happened, and suddenly it was like, 'Oh, I could do that kind of stuff.'
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