I did have a lot of years watching and appreciating dance and theater and all of those kind of things, and it has informed the way that I work with actors and the way I approach things.
There's something I have about being Canadian - there's a distance it gives you when you live in the States and operate in American culture. You approach familiar things a different way; you come at it from a different angle. It's a trait that runs through a lot Canadian artists' work and actors' work and musicians' - that kind of special remove.
A lot of things about my way of leadership is to be vocal, but I try to lead by example - how I approach work and study the game. Do the things the right way. It's a great responsibility I love to have.
Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly, Donald O'Connor - those were my idols. All I ever wanted to be was a motion picture song-and-dance man. I kind of fell into other things. Did walk-ons and bits for years and worked in little theater at night.
The ownership of money and property comes as a result of doing things in a certain way; those who do things in this Certain Way, whether on purpose or accidentally, get rich; while those who do not do things in this Certain Way, no matter how hard they work or how able they are, remain poor.
Work creates an enormous sense of self and I saw that in my mother. She was an enormous, towering figure to me in the best possible way. I picked up a lot of things from her in the way that I work... I also picked up a lot of the failings of when your father doesn't have those things and that results in a house that turns into a minefield.
Before this country came on the scene, for thousands of years people did things the same way. Within 200 years of the advent of this nation, men were walking on the moon, and I want us to recognize this is the kind of people that we are. We're creative with a lot of ingenuity and a lot of energy.
Everything that has happened to me in a good way, I never thought in a million years those things would happen. Now that I have achieved those things, there's kind of always another mountain to climb.
That's kind of the nature of the profession I'm in. It's frustrating. Things don't go your way, and I was no exception, in that I spent many years struggling to get work, and there are a lot of people more talented than myself who got jobs before me. And I finally, after years and years and years, got lucky.
A lot of critics sometimes get into analyzing the way actors direct versus non-actors directing. And they really always miss it. It's one of those things where, by not being practitioners, they just came up with something that made sense to them.
I love a lot of things, a whole lot of things / Like / My cousin comes to visit and you know he's from the South /'Cause every word he says just kind of slides out of his mouth / I like the way he whistles and I like the way he walks / But honey, let me tell you that I love the way he talks.
If Rob Ford decided he wanted to run for the Liberal Party in 2015, we'd say, 'No, sorry, the way you approach things, the way you govern, the way you behave is not suitable to the kind of Liberal team we want to build.'
Everyone needs some trial and error figuring out how it's gonna work for them. I could have gotten that out of the way a little sooner but I think you're totally right, the way I kind of think about things and the way I wanted to put myself out there doesn't fit the traditional side of things. I needed things like podcasts and YouTube and things that allow you to get it out there yourself and stand in the flames.
Sometimes things in life take a few years to digest, and they find their way into the work later on. Sometimes I'm writing about things from eight years ago-they just took a long time to distill and come out in the appropriate way.
I approach my work the way an actor approaches their work. The only difference is that I do comedy, and my job is to make things funny. My style makes things sound like they're improvisational and happening right then and there.
I found that dance was key to keeping depression out of my life. When you dance, things just go away, things don't seem so bad. There's no better way to take care of health than through something as joyous and beautiful as dance.
We were always in church, and always singing, so once I realized that music was something that I had a knack for, I sort of latched onto it, and it helped give me an identity and figure out who I was as a person. It informed my way into theater, which informed my way into television.