Voice work is fun. But about three-quarters of the things you enjoy about acting are just not there. You're not working with another actor; you're not working with an audience. You're just working with a bunch of writers and a microphone. It's very abstract.
Whenever I play a role, it's like I've been kidnapped inside my own body.
I do think - I always tell that to young people - go to college, do theater, work with an audience. Don't try to learn how to act in front of millions and millions of people. Don't make that your first ambition, to be on a sitcom or get into the movies. Learn who you are as an actor, and the best way to do that is to do it in front of an audience.
I grew up with this crazy upbringing of living many places and always being the new kid in town, not like a service brat where you're always going to school with other new kids in town. I was constantly arriving in small towns and going to school with kids who'd been together since they were in kindergarten.
My eagerness to please sometimes gets the better of me.
My wife is a professor at UCLA in Los Angeles, but otherwise, I'd be right back living on the Upper West Side.
The zombie is the new, sort of, archetype of our times.
I actually was very proud of 'Dexter' and had a wonderful time doing it, which must make me an extremely weird person.
I'm a very slow and ponderous reader, but I'm dogged.
In animation, there's this exhilarating moment of discovery when you see the film and you say, Oh THAT'S what I was doing.
I am such a coward when it comes to political arguments. I tend to sort of recoil rather than engage.
There is less difference than you would imagine entertaining little children and entertaining adults.
If it's well written and well directed and you've got good actors to work with, acting is easy. But making sure all the ducks are in a row is the hard part. It's very rare.
Shakespeare is like mother's milk to me.
Britain is probably the most sophisticated combination of a monarchy and a democracy.
I look around, and 50 percent of the big-budget entertainment you are seeing these days is dystopian. This is the era of 'Hunger Games' and blasted landscapes and 'The Walking Dead.'
If you go through your life being completely truthful, everybody will hate you, and something I deeply fear is being hated.
I'm an avid Boston Red Sox fan.
There's nothing like spending an evening with an audience every night.
Churchill is so particular. He's as different from the rest of the population of Britain as he is from me.
Look at the darkest hit musicals - Cabaret, West Side Story, Carousel - they are exuberant experiences. They send you out of the theater filled with music.
Anytime a culture is in economic stress, ugly things start happening.
What you aspire to on a sitcom is the feeling of live comedy.
I have a lot of faith in people.
I'm a fun father, but not a good father. The hard decisions always went to my wife.
Out of suffering comes creativity. You cannot spell painting without pain.
I look on myself as a sort of hybrid, having grown up in the world of Shakespeare out in the cornfields of Ohio.
I got to have a great big knock-down, drag-out fight with Sylvester Stallone. Every actor should have that much fun at some point. You can hit him as hard as you can, and it's never enough for him.
I'd sleep under a Vermeer.
People have expectations from you - and the whole fun of acting is taking expectations and completely upending them. That's how you get laughs in comedy, and that's how you scare the daylights out of people in a horror film.
If you read in front of your kids, it's very likely that they'll become readers, too.
Everybody's a dreamer.
In TV and movies, you get known for a certain thing, and that's what's expected. Onstage, people are more open to whatever character you create from one play to the next.
You don't see many films about a long, long relationship.
When I was 13 years old, I went to visit my aunt and uncle in Washington, D.C., and they just deposited me at the National Gallery. I would go from Rembrandt to Picasso - I remember that experience so vividly.
My wife tells me I always have to have a project. A 'projectophile' or something. It's true. I always feel like the grass is growing under my feet.
I'm too much of a Libra. I too often see the other person's point of view and capitulate, even though I have strong political convictions. It's just my liability. Maybe I'm too empathetic. That's the actor in me.
Powerful people are always in charge. You have to acknowledge that and deal with it as a reality. They're not devils. They're not monsters. They're human beings, like us, that have their share of insecurities and fears. You have to contemplate that as you go through life.
I do all the cooking in the family. I cook Italian, mostly, pastas and roasts, and bit by bit, I'm learning how to bake. I think cooking is a gift to other people.
I have a love/hate relationship with my height - I am 6 ft. 4 in.
I keep looking for things I haven't done yet.
I loved playing Roberta Muldoon!
If a film is about love, it tends to be about tortured love or discovering love or young love. It's not this wonderful kind of comfortable, old resilient love.
The Broadway audience is made up of a greater percentage of tourists now. There's not nearly as much variety and danger and challenge in what's being offered.
If you're an actor, you tend to fool yourself into thinking you're much younger than you are because you're playing parts and behaving like a child all the time.
I gave up shame a long time ago.
My hairline is receding. So my days as a romantic lead - even though I've never had them - are behind me.
Academics tend to have wonderfully infantile senses of humor.
Growing up in an atmosphere of storytelling made me an actor.
