Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
From Borges, those wonderful gaucho stories from which I learned that you can be specific as to a time and place and culture and still have the work resonate with the universal themes of love, honor, duty, betrayal, etc. From Amiri Baraka, I learned that all art is political, although I don't write political plays.
In the time between when you first read a script and are offered the role and the time when you begin to shoot, I really love putting in the time and work on that and getting a solid backstory to a character and researching all that I can about what that person does for a vocation or their upbringing or where they're from.
I never looked at basketball as work. I always enjoyed it as my hobby. I loved it. Once that love is gone, and I'm tired of working out every day and doing all the stuff to get me ready for games, and I'm tired of lifting and conditioning and doing all that other stuff around it, and I'd rather stay in bed, then it's time to go.
I talk all the time about how much I read growing up and how much I love Stephen King and how he impacted my work from a genre perspective, but Pat Conroy wrote some of the most magnificent stories about characters who had to deal with dysfunctional families and try to find a place of honor in their own world and the pain of loss.
Find something that you love to do, and find a place that you really like to do it in. I found something I loved to do. I'm a mechanical engineer by training, and I loved it. I still do. My son is a nuclear engineer at MIT, a junior, and I get the same vibe from him. Your work has to be compelling. You spend a lot of time doing it.
Ryder Cup, Presidents Cup, whatever it may be, is maybe the most fun couple weeks we have a year, but I love being able to control my own destiny. The work that I am able to put in ahead of time was either going to come out and I was going to be successful with it, or I was going to try and fail and learn how to succeed the next time.
I believe in love. I believe in good stories. I play really hard on the weekends because I like to have those stories. My wife and I go off and do craziness all the time. We're just like, 'What can we go get into this weekend?' Then we have other ones where we just sit and do nothing and then we have work that we do. It's all memories.
I just love the people I work with so much, you know. It's an embarrassment of riches to get to work with Kristen Schaal and Mel Rodriguez and Mary Steenburgen and Boris Kodjoe and Cleopatra Coleman and January Jones, but then to get to bring Jason Sudeikis into the mix, you know, we're like brothers from all that time we spent together.
I love the beautiful distractions of the world - television and movies, video games, the Internet in general. But I try really hard to avoid them, because they don't help me become a better writer. They subtract hours from my day. And a writer's main currency is time. Time to daydream, time to walk and think, time to sit and do the work.
Every time I talk about 'The Shield' I kind of talk about it from three perspectives, as if I'm three people, because I'm a fan of the show. I'm in love with all the other characters and their journeys and their work. But then, as an actor, I love getting this kind of rich material and having to do it. As my character, did my journey finish?