Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I love that Amazon has this incredibly unique, diplomatic process where people's voices are heard, and we're using this great interconnectedness we have, via the internet, to weigh in and to have a say in what we want to see and what we don't.
While I feel that I have a great reservoir to draw from as an actor for lots of different roles, it is difficult because it can be an industry where it's people's jobs to thin-slice you really quickly and try to fit you into a niche in the market.
I remember taking my brother's car out, pushing it down the driveway in neutral in the night, and going out joyriding with friends and getting flat tires and getting busted. My license was revoked by my dad. So, definitely, I was a kid. I was a teenage boy.
My personal life is a source of incredible happiness for me, but it's personal and it's not for me to hock, or shop around to the highest bidder. Plus, it could never live up to the amazing mythology that everyone online has created for me, so I'll keep mum about it.
I remember I was really, really proud the first moment I got my insurance and also just going in to get my SAG card and filling out the form and realizing I was a member of all the unions I could be a part of as an actor. It was a really fulfilling experience for me.
I’m a pretty chill person. I’m kind of a homebody and I like to just hang out with friends and have dinner. I’m not, you know - I’m definitely not Neal Caffrey in the sense that I’m not, you know, drinking a $500 bottle of wine at a nightclub. I’m just - I’m pretty chill.
When you really put your heart and soul into something, the temptation is to try to be in control of circumstances, however you can, and looking and seeing how people are responding. But I realized, early on, that that was just not going to be a healthy thing for me to do.
Having done television for almost 20 years now, a pilot is kind of like a rough draft. It's like bringing people into your ultrasound and hooking up to the monitor and going, "Isn't my baby beautiful?" "Yeah. I can only see the outline of it, but it looks like it might be."
When you are the avatar for the writer/director, a lot of times, I just trusted him. If he had a choice, even if it wasn't necessarily what was my first impulse, I was like, "Billy Ray has been living with this for two years before I even came on board, so I'm going with him."
I took movement classes that I wore my double-breasted suits to. I worked on my elocution because people spoke differently then. I was really trying to toe the line. I think that if I had spoken exactly the way that people spoke back then, it probably would have alienated people.
'The Kids Are All Right' is amazing. The performances are insanely good. Julianne Moore is going to wreck you. This is the best I've ever seen her, and I've seen everything she's ever done. I like the story, and I think it's a great alternative to the big summer popcorn blockbusters.
I'm a long time [Scott] Fitzgerald fan, as probably everyone in America is. And I've always been fascinated by that theme of, what is the price of the American dream and what parts of your soul do you walk away with? The conflict of art versus commerce was also very interesting to me.
For me, I look at a pilot and go, 'I see the landscape. I see the characters. I see the direction and the potential of the story.' And I also go, 'That didn't work. I could change that. Maybe that works. I don't know. We'll see.' For me, I look at it, as an actor, as what can I improve upon?
Billy [Ray] is a preternatural enthusiast. He would say things to me like, "Now, let me tell you about Episode 3." I'm a big superstitious, having done television for quite some time, and I would say, "Billy, I can't wait to hear about it, but let's just stay here for right now, see what happens, and enjoy this moment.
How can you not have preconceived notions and expectations of who Kelsey Grammer is gonna be? He's been in my living room since my TV was on. And he exceeded them all, somehow. He's such a beautiful and open-hearted collaborator and mentor and such a great family man. I was just lucky to get to work with him and learn from him.
For me, a lot of these actors are new. For me, I only worked with Finn Whittrock and Michael Chiklis. So a lot of these actors are people I've been a huge fan of for years and are bucket-list actors for me to get to work with. It's pretty surreal now getting to step into scenes with them.You all get to find your characters together.
Obviously, when you finish something like 'White Collar,' there are so many opportunities to just do something similar because people want that kind of thing, and I really have tried to stretch myself out, for better or for worse. I hope that I'm able to get to continue to do that, as an artist, and I'm not the guy who shows up to be charming.
Outside of, as a kid, just wanting to be able to fly and run faster than a speeding locomotive and being able to leap tall buildings in a single bound, we'd like to hope that, when push comes to shove, we can do the right thing. I think as long as there is that hope in our society and in the zeitgeist of superheroes, Superman will be relevant.
I think your text [script] is everything; it's what informs you; it's what gives you the given circumstances. Then you take that and you add your own creativity and your own spin on things and you make it personal. That's what makes that character and that text unique to you, when you personalize it. I think that's where your job as an actor comes in.
I really saw Pat Brady, Kelsey Grammer's character's point of view that it's a business. It's show business. So, it was an incredible opportunity to work with really wonderful creatives and the script was fantastic. What was so interesting to me about the studio system was that a lot of the politics that were in play then are so really relevant to today.
I had just finished reading The Day of the Locust when this piece was brought to my attention, and I was like, "How do you create art in the system, the way it is?" Looking around the studio film landscape, there are all of these great superhero movies, which is fantastic, especially for my kids, but it's hard to find real art house films in the studio system, these days.
I look at a pilot and go, "I see the landscape. I see the characters. I see the direction and the potential of the story." And I also go, "That didn't work. I could change that. Maybe that works. I don't know. We'll see." For me, I look at it, as an actor, as what can I improve upon? So, to have it out there and judged solely on its own merit is really a unique experience for me.
I very comprehensively studied Irving Thalberg and his biographies. He's who [Scott] Fitzgerald roughly modeled the character after. He worked for him, as a writer, when he was at MGM. And, of course, I revisited the novel and the politics of MGM and the studio system at the time and familiarized myself with the world. There was a great deal of physical and literary work that went into it.
What we really have to do is stop the adjective before the job title — whether it's 'black actor,' a 'gay actor' or 'anything actor,' Everybody thinks that equality comes from identifying people, and that's not where equality comes from. Equality comes from treating everybody the same regardless of who they are. I hope the media and the press catches on to that because it's time to move out of 1992.
One of the many things I love about working with Ryan Murphy is that you're always thin-sliced in this business. You walk into a room and people want you to be how you look or how you're perceived or whatever it is in that 10 minutes that hey meet you. I think Ryan [Murphy] has an intuition that looks a little bit deeper and sees things that other people might not see in you - sometimes you might not even see in yourself - but that he knows are there and that he might want to get to grow and stretch with as an actor.
The last thing I want to do is having someone get behind a Montgomery Clift biopic, and then just do the first script that came out. Sometimes it takes a long time for these things to gestate. And I'm only going to do it if it's the right story that's told for the right reason, and that's relevant to this day and age, as much as it pays homage to who this man was. Should that happen during the time when I'm still young enough to play him, perfect. And if not, hopefully someone else will get to play him because I do think it's an incredible story.
I’m so thankful to have been born in the times that we live in. I felt a responsibility to Simon [Halls] and to our kids to be able to live with integrity and not have some strange split psychology of This is who my dad is at home, and this is who he is to the public. That trumped any type of professional repercussions that it could have had. And – not by my own volition or choice – I’ve been playing exclusively straight characters for the first 10 years of my career. Whatever happens from this point on says a lot more about the business and society than it does about me.