I'm not a classically trained actor. I'm not a product of Stavlovski method or anything like that.
I never rode a motorcycle before 'CHiPs.'
I come from a working-class family in Pittsburgh, whereas 'Mike & Molly' deals with the working class in Chicago. I swear a little, but I pretty much talk the same. It's not like when you see someone like Tim Allen and he's a lot bluer onstage.
Most actors spend a lot of time training themselves to be an actor. And I kind of didn't do that.
I didn't grow up wanting to become an actor at all. I wanted to be a sports trainer and I was actually an aerobics instructor.
Yet the reality is that I'm a stage actor from the Midwest - probably the opposite of a shark agent.
On the whole, British actors star in theater, and I think there's something quite grounding about that.
For me, I was a musician long before I was an actor.
So far I've done two films that have basically been about television because I know that world.
Ordinarily if an actor gets chosen for the lead in a film, he or she has already built up a repertoire, and everyone knows what he or she is capable of.
I think that, often, actors represent what they're not. You get people who define the aristocracy who are not aristocratic - they're lower-middle class or working class. An awful lot of your so-called angry young actors have grown up in extreme bourgeois comfort. It really is surprisingly common.
My background is in psychology and I'm also a stage actor. That's my background.
Before Michael Caine you had to have been in the RAF to be an actor.
I love stage actors. The pool of world class actors that have done theater [is big], there's a higher opportunity of grabbing somebody from that pool.
New Jersey is very big. There are different areas of New Jersey. There is North New Jersey. There is like the center. There are a lot of actors from New Jersey that don't speak with a New Jersey accent.
Before I became an actor, I was a producer and a visual effects supervisor. Our industry wasn't making the kind of films I was interested in.
And my father, being a good Swiss puritan, always really insisted that if I was going to be an actor, I shouldn't just be an actor, I should know about the whole process.
Every actor comes with their own experience, method, methodology.
Here in America, every single actor, since they were little boys, they sing and dance and perform like angels. We don't do that. We are actors who work in a theater in very classic performances or plays.
I wasn't a child actor. It was just three weeks of my life when I was eight.
I've done about six comedies. Oddly enough, the script came to me from one of the guys in Platoon.
I'd been on all the television programs as an actor, as a writer, as a director, as a producer.
I'm just like James Stewart, because I never studied to be an actor.
Look at someone like Edward Norton. A truly phenomenal actor. He's definitely went to school and trained.
There are lots of people in the world who do have the advantage of going to a good drama school and just decide that they want to be actors. There's nothing wrong with an untrained actor; they have to get their training somehow, they have to learn.
