I had the great good fortune of working with Christopher Plummer, Frances Sternhagen, and Arthur Hill early in my career, and it set a standard for the kind of work I want to do.
I'm extremely particular how my look should be in a film.
I mark a script like an exam, and I try not to do anything under 50 per cent. Similarly with the part. And also film is a peculiar thing, parts don't necessarily read in script form anything like as well as they can do when it comes to materialising.
My feeling is, I do a lot of low-budget films. I don't do low-budget acting. I have no interest in just goofballing my way through, thinking, 'Ah, no one's ever going to see this anyway.'
Just because we're on schedule is no reason to shoot bad acting. Someone once said to me, 'You're inconsiderate.' And I said, 'Inconsiderate? Bad acting is the ultimate inconsideration.' It's a collective slap to a million faces at the same time.
I don't know a single actor who is not picky.
I'm from a country where acting is taken very seriously; it's a very serious profession.
f they'd been working with Alec Guinness, for instance, they wouldn't have known they were born if they'd not towed the line!
I don't want to sound hoity-toity, but people told me I should watch 'Cheers' because it's very funny. So I watched it, and I just went, 'This is the great show of the universe?' To me, acting is making characters believable, not just doing jokes.
Every actor has to make terrible films from time to time, but the trick is never to be terrible in them.
When you look at some of the most respected actors there are and the crap that they're in... it didn't used to be that way.
It's rare that I come across actors who are willing to work as hard on the material as I am.
I'm pretty tough and picky when it comes to actors that I admire.
I'm so open to different things. The only thing I'd say is I've set the bar pretty high in terms of good female roles with 'Diary,' and I want to continue in that vein.
The theater has never been any good since the actors became gentlemen.
I will not do a run of the mill kind of a film or role. I will not say yes to that.
I've seen such great material, and now I'm more picky with the type of jobs that I take because it's gotta be there. There's an old theater saying: 'If it's not on the page, it's not on the stage'... You gotta have some type of standards as far as the jobs that you take and the roles that you take on.
British actors behave like Europeans; they are also extremely well trained.
I thought, if I was going to date an actor, I wanted a real actor.
As an actor, whether you look good or you don't, it's still about what you look like: Whether you are heavy enough to play this part or thin enough to play that part. The fact of the matter is, you can add a little weight with some extra padding, but you can't shave it off.
Only a certain breed of actor should ever even try to work for Orson Welles. I'm glad I'm one of that breed.
Even when I was really young, I hated doing commercials, because I would say, "That's not real acting." And it's not. It's embarrassing what they make little kids do in commercials.
I would love to do theater. But I am very picky when choosing theater. I just won't do anything.
If a role has been too one-dimensional, I have turned it down.
Character actors are becoming a thing of the past. They're just going by the wayside. They're just cutting through that caliber of acting.
