Denis Leary Quotes

I watched Mark Rylance in the Broadway revival of 'La Bete,' and it knocked my socks off. The complete commitment, passion, and unbridled enjoyment in every moment of what he was doing was overwhelming.

I always like to try to bring whatever I can to what is on the page, so I like to find as much dimension as I can, in each role.

As an actor, I feel like youre asked to live life as vibrantly as possible.

You can be a little bit darker and rougher on the stage, partly because when you're in the theater, people have come to see you, and so they kind of know what they're in for. In television, you are sort of sneaking into people's homes. So, I think you can be a little bit darker on stage.

Mine is an actor's voice, not a singer's voice, but the part was written for an actor (Richard Burton), not a singer.

It's a little bit odd. The first time you do the play, you kind of throw yourself into it, trying to get the most out of all the individual moments. Then, a few hours later, you're still there, wondering what you could possibly do differently than what you just did a couple hours ago.

Johnny Depp's performance is quite remarkable. Sweeney's desire for revenge and the simmering anger and hurt that he feels carry the story forward, and Johnny finds the most remarkable variety within that narrow set of emotions. The intensity is at a boil all the time and he never drops it. It's real anger.

This is a movie version of the play [All the Way]and when Bryan [Cranston] was on stage the bigness of the man was played to the back of the house. When we turned the cameras on that, it changed a bit with close-ups, but we got just as much power in that beautiful intimacy.

I think there are three types of actors. There are the ones that do the ego thing, which is "I'm never going to look bad in a movie, ever." This is mostly the action film dudes, like, "Nah, hell no. He ain't punchin' me! I'd whoop his ass!" Then you've got the activist type who bases their decisions in the development of a character on what it symbolizes to society - what the ethical code is. And then the third type is a true thespian who doesn't give a flying rat's ass what it is as long as it's deep, powerful, and painful, and they will dive in headfirst. I really respect those people.

I have lived my whole life on the stage and screen before you. I found purpose and meaning in your response.

Wrestling and acting couldn't be anymore different in terms of what it takes to entertain. Wrestling is explosion, acting is implosion. One really screws up the other.

For me, the only type of guilty pleasure fun that I have in terms of my career is I act once in awhile. And I don't have any responsibility.

In a way, being an opera singer is like being a very romantic sixteen-year-old who falls in love with great passion and conviction every month.

I have always wanted to do a book about actors because I think that the death of a character is a tremendously emotional experience.

He knows what it's like to strut and fret his hour upon the stage and then be heard no more.

I've only had one dramatic role in my entire career and when I did it, I was in heaven and I thought, 'Oh my god, I'm going to get more of these.'

I think theater has given me the opportunity to show what a character actor I can be.

I want to do more drama. Comedy is the path of least resistance for my company. People know we can do them. People know they get a good response. People want to make them. Who am I to push up against that?

Viola [Davis] is one of the great actors of her generation. She has one of these moments in the theater that I don't even know how to describe.

Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounce it to you, trippingly on the tongue; but if you mouth it, as many of your players do, I had as lief the town-crier spoke my lines.

If I could make the same amount of money doing standup it would be no contest. The problem is that if you do make that kind of money doing standup, it's not in clubs, it's in big auditoriums and large venues, and I really think something is lost when you do standup for a big crowd.

Theatre is simply what cannot be expressed by any other means; a complexity of words, movements, gestures that convey a vision of the world inexpressible in any other way.

There's something mystical and wonderful about being in the room with the actual live performer s on stage that works. In film, it doesn't work so you're dependent on a great director to keep the thing moving along.

Just concentrate on the performers. Make sure you get the performers, and that's it. That's all we need to do." And I was thinking, "Well what if you do both? Of course the performance is important, the writing is really important. But what if you could have the perfect marriage of making it look really slick as well?" I think that's kind of what I tried to develop as a style, and Spaced was the first TV show I did where all the elements came together.

You need to be a good screen partner. It's very meaningful to me to be a part of great acting performances.