Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Tony Hale is a devout Christian and is a complete retard when it comes to swearing. The script called for him to swear for about 30 seconds and he just couldn't do it.
When you're actor, you have no idea how much work goes into pre-production. We're just sitting in our trailers waiting for someone to knock on our door to go to the set.
It was like 'Risky Business' for 10 years. My parents were out of town, they left me a bunch of money, the car, and the house, and I didn't know when they were coming home.
I never looked at fan mail, for some reason. My mother and grandmother handled my mail - although it's not like I was ever in the stratosphere of Kirk Cameron or Scott Baio.
We had, like, the greatest time you could ever imagine doing 'Arrested Development.' And as grateful as we are for the careers we have afterwards, it was - we still miss it.
I'm not a big, huge star, and so when people see me, it's usually to talk about something I've done, and that's a great conversation to have. That's what we're doing it for.
I wanted to marry somebody who wasn't someone I had to be in any particular mood to want to be around - with close friends, you can be with them no matter what mood you're in.
I can be on a telephone call, and be emailing or texting somebody else, as well. I would imagine everyone appreciates that efficiency of communication. I see it as a huge positive.
The kids can't watch 'The Wire,' but there's great educational stuff for them to watch on TV if it is TV time. There are great apps on the iPad that are interactive and educational.
It's not new: In the '70s, Archie Bunker said terrible things on 'All in the Family,' but it was all in Carroll O'Connor's performance. You saw lack of intelligence, and you laughed.
Actors, by very definition, we want people to pay attention to us, and so usually, that comes in the package of insecurity. So if we're not comfortable, we don't really show you a lot.
It was a blast. I was doing everything that teenagers do and everything people in their twenties do. I was playing as hard as I was working, which was an effort to really balance my life.
What's frustrating as an actor, when you want to work hard, you can only work once that phone rings and then you can only work until the production wraps. Then you have to find another job.
I looked around at the relationships that were the longest in my life, and they were the ones I had with my friends. I thought, 'If I only wanted to get married once, I should probably marry a friend.'
Meeting my wife Amanda was the best thing that could ever have happened to me. She wasn't going to let me screw around my life anymore, so I stopped drinking and started behaving like a decent human being.
Starting at age 10, my personality and my identity all stemmed from employment. I had a set to be at. I was a certain way with the cameraman, a certain way with the makeup lady - a normal, routine environment.
My father was a director and producer, so when I was a little kid, he would take me to movies and show me what's good and what's not good and why, and often that would take me to a conversation about directing.
Acting in something that I'm directing... I'm really enjoying it because, if for no other reason, that particular acting is like reading my mind on every single take. It's kind of efficient, for better or worse.
I guess there's nothing funny about a guy who looks conservative and has it all together, but it's satisfying to see a conservative guy crumbling inside, and I think a lot of American comedy has cottoned on to that.
I only wanted to get married once, so when I felt I was ready to handle it, I looked at my relationships and noticed that boyfriends get tired of girlfriends, and vice versa, but you never get tired of your friends.
To have the privileged position of being the guy who is responsible for shaping the entire experience for an audience as opposed to being just one instrument in that orchestra, being an actor, it's all-encompassing.
I wanted to be Dustin Hoffman or Robert De Niro or Al Pacino. I thought I was going to be a dramatic actor, but comedy sort of started out first, and I was like, 'Maybe I'll find some more drama later on in my career.'
I try to see everything I do. It's a good learning tool for me. You kind of remember what you were going for when you were shooting it, and then see how it comes across in the context of what comes before and after it.
My comedic instinct, is a little bit more rooted in - my mother's British so I've always been more of the dry receiver of the crazy as opposed to the initiator of the crazy. I'm kind of predisposed to be the straight man.
The directing is something that is incredibly satisfying to me and challenging to me because it's asking me to draw on everything I've been able to absorb over all these years of acting and having all this set experience.
I really like dramas that have a tone of comedy in them or the opposite, and those are done by people like Alexander Payne and Jason Reitman but also Spike Jonze and David O. Russell and Paul Thomas Anderson, the Coen Brothers.
My father was a writer/director/producer, so instead of throwing a ball around, our bonding was going to see movies. And at an early age, I knew if I wanted to impress my dad, it was not going to be by throwing a ball real far.
When you know your mom and dad are doing things that are not idyllic, as far as your desire to defer to a parental ideal, you start to see your parents as peers, perhaps, and that's not the healthiest thing at that early an age.
And I've always loved commercials. I like working out how to organically weave a brand's message into the writing process. It's like an improv show, where comics ask the audience to throw out a word and a skit is built around it.
If the goal is to be believable when you're acting, I've got the best idea of what that believability might look and feel like. And because you need a normal guy in a comedy so that the eccentricities can pop, that's a good part for me.
There's this little recipe that you have to hit pretty well to get somebody to laugh. And it's a combination of the way in which you say something, with the facial expression that you have, married with the body language that you have, etc.
As an actor, you only get to work 15 minutes an hour; as a director you're fully immersed. It's incredibly more complex and challenging and I love it. I'm sort of a glutton for work and to direct something that I'm acting in feeds the vein.
Not a lot of people get a second chance. And I think for a while there, my name kind of got in my way a bit, based on all of the television I was fortunate enough to do. But after a while, you sort of wear out your welcome in that genre, in that medium.
The longer you stay in the job that you do the more you learn about what those around you do. As an actor I've always nosed around apologetically about: "oh wouldn't it be interesting if I could do that?" I can't imagine not wanting to do this everyday.
I think things that are really, really not good are easy to see. But films that are decent can either be made good or great based on the execution. At the end of the day, it's always a crapshoot about the execution, the level of taste, in any department.
Kids want you to take them to whatever kid movie is opening, and you just hope it's good because you're going to buy a ticket, no matter what. If it's no good, you kind of drape your arm over your kid so they don't get smashed, and you take a little nap.
I'm in a little bit of a different situation, because working in the business that I do and living in the city that I live in, I haven't had a problem with people who are gay. Since I was 10 I've been working alongside them, and some of my best friends are gay.
Television is much more of a producer's writer's medium, so a lot of the time, when you're directing a television show, they have a color palette on set or a visual style and dynamic that's already been predetermined, and you just kind of have to follow the rules.
I wasn't really interested in doing anything except going from pilot season to pilot season and sowing my oats in the months between and telling my agency to stop sending me movie scripts, because they'd pile up in my house and make me feel guilty because I had to read them.
I've always felt bad that I never had more information to give people when they asked me about it, but I guess people kind of got frustrated by that and they just started kind of making up their own sort of "well, we haven't heard that much" or "news hasn't changed so it must be going away".
Our job, as actors, is to just try to be as accurate and as mindful of what the audience is going through and receiving and processing. If it's a situation where the character should look a little bit out of control or do something stupid, it's your job to act into that, in a believable way.
I don't get a chance to cry that often on film, so I was hoping that talent would come my way, that day. I cheated, I guess, when I just started looking at my technology device - my iPhone - to look at pictures of my kids, before I did the scene where I had to cry. That was a good trick that I found.
It's not about the script: it's about who the director is and who the other people in the cast are. Because you can look at a great script and execute it in a very sophomoric way, and you can look at an OK script, and you can execute it in a very sophisticated way and come out with something really good.
That straight man character is a short trip between comedy and drama in a project, so I can play the comedic beat on the same page as a dramatic beat. It gives me a lot of freedom as an actor to play scenes in multiple ways because I don't play the clown, nor do I play someone who is particularly maudlin.
We had this neighbor who was an actor, and he was going to an audition one day, driving by our house, and he asked if I wanted to tag along. He was reading for the part of the father, and they were reading for the part of the son the same day, and he told me to sneak in there and make it look like I knew what I was doing.
Throughout my 20s I spent a lot of time just playing and not really working, but fortunately for me I continued to get just enough work, and have a reason to wake up in the morning. I really empathize with some of my peers who had success in the early years then it dries up, and so there's no reason to get up in the morning.
My goal is to get another 30 years out of this business. So I need to figure out the fuel to do that. And so far, I think it's respect and quality and company, not celebrity or box office or stardom. It's not a sprinter's approach. It's more like a long-distance thing. You can stick around a lot longer if you kind of slow-play it.
You do certain things in your twenties that are just not appropriate in your thirties and certainly not appropriate in your forties. Eventually you even the scales, and it's time to move on and become an adult and start working hard again and going to sleep a little bit earlier. Fortunately, I got a job to facilitate that transition.
In most professions, if you stay at the office an extra four hours every day, you're gonna impress the boss. You're gonna get that promotion; you're gonna get that raise. You're gonna at least have job security. But with acting, if you're really ambitious and you have a good work ethic and are really good at your job, it might not really matter.
People like Bill Murray are incredible at what they do and are definitely my flavour. Although Will Ferrell, Sacha Baron Cohen and Ricky Gervais are also incredible actors. In their comedy, they make these stupid people feel so real. These guys are really setting the bar very high, and I learn as much from them about acting as I do about comedy.