Randy West Quotes

In the year and a half I was on SNL, I never saw anybody ad lib anything. For a very good reason - the director cut according to the script. So, if you ad libbed, you'd be off mike and off camera.

Live TV has an amazing pace to it. You've got to be able to think quick, make changes last minute, and be funny and fast.

Being on 'The Following' is constantly flying by the seat of my pants. The story can change and the character can change at a moment's notice.

I mean, there's definitely a difference between film and live performances or live television. But at the same time, it's just performing. No matter what, it's performing.

One of the problems with 'SNL' is that, if you tried to adlib, the director would put you off camera and off the mic, so only you would know that you ever did it. The director always directed to the script; he wasn't listening to what you were doing. He was calling shots whilst looking at the page.

Sometimes, you don't know what's going to happen to your character until the night before you shoot the scene. So, sometimes, you get a great big surprise at the very last minute, which is scary sometimes. You don't have a whole lot of time to prepare.

I was asked to be on 'The Colbert Report' last year as Big Bird and Oscar. But when we got there, we discovered they wanted both characters on at the same time. Stephen Colbert didn't know one man plays them both. We called Joey Mazzarino, our head writer, who's a very good puppeteer as well. He agreed to zip over and do Oscar.

If I have one criticism of the other late-night shows, it's that they're almost entirely scripted.

A master of improvised speech and improvised policies.

You don't get time to rehearse in film and TV at all.

It's very unusual on 'Game of Thrones' for there to be a deleted scene because the scripts are pretty locked in. There's rarely a reason to say, 'Hey, we don't need this scene.'

Tim Conway was a little different from the rest. He was always in the back of the studio building something with the prop man, rewriting his lines, or plotting our demise.

Television is fast and loose. You have two or three takes to get your part right, and if you have a problem, well, by the time you figure it out, everyone's moved on to the next scene. It's good training, keeps you on your toes.

I had always sort of done dramatic things, and I love them; it's my background. But when I think about 'Fresh Meat,' I just think about the cast and the crew that we had... we just had a great time.

It is hard to be an actor on a TV show, because you don't know what's coming and you sort of find out very last minute sort of what's happening.

It's the only time that I'm ever nervous on stage, is when we're doing live TV. Especially an awards show, because I know you can't fix it.

There are no rules in live television.

I mean one of the weird things about TV and one of the things that some actors don't like but I kind of dig is that you never know where you're headed, I mean you never know what the writer might think of next.

Live television is always stressful and the more you do it, the more you realise what can go wrong.

With a sitcom, everyday you do a run through, and people are judging you, and the scripts are being changed nightly, nightly, nightly.

When you perform in front of an audience after only two days of rehearsal, you're flying by the seat of your pants - particularly when they're rewriting the show right up to the moment the camera goes on.

On 'Whose Line,' we had six, seven, eight scenes per show, so everything was pretty quick. And there's a lot of games that we just got tired of, like 'Hats' and 'World's Worst' and 'Hoedown' and stuff.

You can go on 'Saturday Night Live' now and not even play live.

Sometimes they keep us in the dark, but it's TV, so sometimes they keep us in the dark because even they don't know yet. You know what I mean? So, it sort of develops as it goes along and according to various needs that arise.

But once we got on the air, everybody except Morey Amsterdam pretty much stuck to the script.