Elias Koteas Quotes

It feels that way when I'm doing a play, absolutely. On film and television, it's more complicated than that I think, and when you start to add the business into the mix, and the industry into the mix, it doesn't maintain it's purity. That's something that's inevitable and unavoidable, but that's why I try to do plays as much as I possibly can.

I've played a murderer, so certainly I think I can play a Republican.

I did a couple of little Off-Broadway things, but my first Broadway show was A History Of The American Film, written by Chris Durang. Swoosie Kurtz was one of the stars. It was a wonderful show. It closed in 40 performances. I think it was kind of ahead of its time.

It takes a lot out of you to do a stage play, but I'd love to do that. I'd love to continue to do challenging material, whatever shape or form that comes in.

The only way to see the value of a play is to see it acted.

What you aim for, as an actor, is to be able to play a range of different roles.

Oh, I like going down the rabbit hole. You know, that's kind of my job. When you play Macbeth, you gotta dive down that one. The trick is figuring out how to do it with love and a sense of humor so you can pop back out again. But, kind of the actor's job is to go down the rabbit hole.

To play Cleopatra on Broadway would just be incredible.

My first experiences with fashion were dressing up. It was always about fantasy for me. Dressing up as characters . . . I always thought that's what clothes were - that they would make you into the person you wanted to be. I'm an actress, so I love to act, and I think that's one of the most important things - the thing that makes you feel like another person.

Happy Ending I did with Paul Winfield. There was a play- within- the- play and I was his mother - which is a peculiar bit of casting, to say the least.

I think all characters that we play are facets of ourselves.

It's exotic for me to be given a script that's already written, and be given a pay cheque, and asked to dress up and play, and that's all.

Sometimes I like to think that characters you play are all the other people you could've been in a lifetime.

I've often wanted to play the victim, or somebody who makes terrible choices. I would love to play the alcoholic mother who horribly lets down her children. That's a great morally imperiled role.

This is not the 19th century, where actors are expected to play completely opposite roles. We're not typecast, but we're brought in because somebody thinks that it's a good fit, so you make it a better fit.

If you're a playwright, unless you're really lacking in get-up-and-go, you can always get your play up somewhere. You can't necessarily make a living doing it, but theater is about meeting an audience. Plays are not easier to write necessarily, they take less time to write. If you get them up, it's a much more rough-and-tumble kind of existence. I think it's, from my perspective, easier than novel writing.

When I was very small, I had that first-time-you-see-a-play experience, which immediately made me want to act, because it seemed like this incredible outlet for something I was already doing fairly compulsively anyway, which was putting on hats and costumes and doing funny voices. It was a very natural compulsion for me.

I find that at almost every press junket I get that comment, "this character's different from what you generally play..." And that's OK! But I think "generally play" stems back to Mr Darcy. I'm fine with it but I tend to find that if it's a departure, which in other people's words it always is, it's always a departure from that.

I'd rather play a maid than be one.

I got to playing villains-I don't know how. I think it's like anything else, in the movies in particular that if you establish yourself as something and you're lucky enough to keep getting hired. You know, there are guys who play the guy who gets the girl, guys who are the best friend of that guy, there's the funny guy, the villain.

Historically, actors have been made very famous for roles that were something that was far - - Richard Widmark comes to mind (playing Tommy Udo in "Kiss of Death") or something like that, where you do some famous role and everybody imitates you for the rest of your life. But obviously it's much more fun to play something you're not than it is to play something you are.

I was up at Big Sur with Christopher Reeve and Christine Lahti, doing this woman in a big fat-suit - Mrs. Bassett in Tennessee Williams' Summer And Smoke - and my husband was in the show too, playing Lahti's fiancée. Every night he'd be proposing to beautiful Christine Lahti, and I'd barrel onstage in this fat-suit. I hated it! But I did it, because by then I knew that that was my casting.

You know how in high school you do these plays and people come up after the show and they're really excited for you? Well, that's what's happening to me right now.

I would say I am more concerned with the plays I'm going to do than the movies. I'm more comfortable in a play. In film, there's always a certain sense of control, of holding back. The stage is different ; there's more to act. There are more demands put on you, more experiences to go through.

I think that it's always great for any actor to play somebody who breathes and lives and is just a regular guy and has faults like we all do.