A Quote by Skeet Ulrich

I've just done a movie - Albino Alligator - with Viggo Mortensen, who's an actor I idolize. He influenced me in a way that has helped me move toward getting lead parts instead of supporting parts, merely through his presence. So now I tell everyone, as a joke, that I'm entering my Viggo Mortensen phase.
I love Viggo Mortensen so much.
Viggo Mortensen had the biggest impact on me in terms of approach, dedication, intention, and artistic outlook, and I'm nowhere close to how good he is as an artist, and I wouldn't even put myself in the same category as an actor.
He [Viggo Mortensen] was standing behind the camera throwing the apples … And I’ve never seen him so happy.
I did the David Cronenberg film, A History of Violence, with Viggo Mortensen and I played a real sociopath. For the next seven years, I played the psycho-of-the-week.
What you would call a 'lead,' I've always considered a supporting part, and what people would call 'supporting parts,' I've considered leads. In a way, I look at it in reverse, because supporting parts - when they're done correctly - are the ones that are progenitors for storylines, to move forward.
Let's put it this way, when I was casting, I cast Viggo first and then found someone who could play his wife, rather than the other way around. So for me he's still the lead character.
The first idea of Captain Fantastic was a pretty radically different one. The genesis had to do with parenting and questions about parenthood and fatherhood specifically. I have two kids and I was grappling with what my values were and what I wanted to pass to my children. So I was positing different kinds of parents and different ways of parenting. I played with various ideas - very permissive parenting, very restrictive parenting and then I came up with the character of Viggo Mortensen, and much of it was aspirational, some of it was autobiographical.
Kill me, Doug. Just kill me now. Put me out of my misery.” “Christ, Kincaid, what did you say to him?” murmured Doug. “Well,” I told Doug, “I ripped on his fans and on how long it takes for his books to come out.” Doug stared at me, his expectations exceeded. “Then I said—not knowing who he was—that I’d be Seth Mortensen’s love slave in exchange for advanced copies of his books.
They say an actor is only as good as his parts. Well, my parts have done me pretty well, darling.
I don't wonder anymore what I'll tell God when I go to heaven when we sit in the chairs under the tree, outside the city........I'll tell these things to God, and he'll laugh, I think and he'll remind me of the parts I forgot, the parts that were his favorite. We'll sit and remember my story together, and then he'll stand and put his arms around me and say, "well done," and that he liked my story. And my soul won't be thirsty anymore. Finally he'll turn and we'll walk toward the city, a city he will have spoken into existence a city built in a place where once there'd been nothing.
I had already played a lead on Broadway before I ever did a film. I had had three, four seasons of stock with good, fat parts, good supporting and leading parts. And I had done, oh, God, over 400 live TV shows.
Bowie's 'Hunky Dory' influenced me. 'Ziggy Stardust' influenced Johnny Ramone a lot, especially his guitar parts.
What I needed to do was carve out parts for me, roles for me that weren't just the sidekick, where I got to be the lead, because that's breaking through.
I can finally see that all the terrible parts of my life, the embarrassing parts, the incidents I wanted to pretend never happened, and the things that make me "weird" and "different," were actually the most important parts of my life. They were the parts that made me ME.
I think there are always actor parts, and then there are movie-star parts, and an actors always an actor until he does a movie-star part.
The first role I ever played I had the lead and it's pretty much stayed that way, though people take great relish in calling me a character actor, which I am. There are a lot of short parts I could play, but I only do them when they are like this ("A Few Good Men"), central to the idea of the movie.
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