On-Set Filming Quotes

Doing films as an actor, you spend maybe 40 percent of the year doing your chosen profession. If you are on a successful TV show, you spend 80 percent of your year doing the thing you love.

I do a lot of shows I've actually never seen, and I hadn't seen 'Castle' or 'Scandal,' but it's fun to just go into someone's world for eight days and do your thing, and then leave.

In 'The Smurfs,' I was actually a live action character. So, I was a real person in that movie. But I was working with animated characters, which is very strange because they're off recording their work, and we're kind of reacting to nothing when we're doing the film.

Major film stars tend to do a film and then have a couple of months off. I'm not a major film star; I'm a jobbing actor.

With film sometimes you're thrown in there and you literally hit the ground running, taking your best shot and just leave it up to the editing.

I don't get much studio stuff. I'm usually on location, and I know that some people think that acting is so glamorous, but believe me, it's not!

In the back of my head, I always thought it would be great to become an actress on a sitcom.

When you're working on a film, it's not theater; you don't have a few weeks of rehearsal. A lot of times you are showing up on set, and you've never been to the place; you've never met the other actors you're working with.

TV is so different from the movies. It takes a lot of stamina because you work such long hours. It is really challenging. You are learning the next day's lines while you are shooting today's scenes. I found courage I never realised I had. I hope to do more.

The live performance aspect of shooting a multicamera sitcom is wonderful. You have that instant audience reaction.

Television is blue-collar work. You clock in in the morning; you work 12, 13 hours - sometimes 18 hours if you're doing 'Orphan Black.'

It's very rare to have rehearsal time on a television show: You get scripts, you show up, and you do it.

Oh, yes, we were on location with Another Man's Poison, which I wrote for Bette Davis.

In terms of 'The Discovery' being a Netflix Original, they actually came on once we had already started shooting.

I don't do rehearsal. Some directors prefer to do rehearsal - readings before the actual shooting - but I don't like this process because I think there are certain things that are so spontaneous, and they cannot happen twice.

You know, it's nice on a sitcom to have an audience there, but there's still a wall of cameras between you and them.

In the U.S., it's like, you start with a great script, and then on set - not everybody, but definitely in the Apatow group - you go off, and you're improvising on camera. So while you're on camera, you're saying things that no one else has ever heard before during the actual take.

Performing live on stage is such a community, whether it's my musicians or a cast of a show that I'm in. And then when you're in the studio or on set, it's a much more solitary experience. Both can serve me at different times in my life. And when I go back and forth from one to the other, it helps me appreciate all of them much better.

I actually can't watch blood and gore and all those things. I watch Netflix shows with my hand over my face, like, peeking out. Which is funny, because I'm on sets all the time, and I know how those effects are done.

To play different characters on a TV show where you're working every day, playing multiple characters every day, it's so ridiculously intense.

My background is in VFX, and I know from experience that the best VFX are when you have something real in the frame that you can either extend or work off of. It was really important to get as much as possible in camera, for real.

Whenever I wasn't in school with a tutor three hours a day, I'd get a knock and be rushed to set and they'd be waiting and I'd film my thing and then I'd go back to school again.

When you get your show - that's what 'King of Queens' was for me. That was my part; that was my show - I was meant to have that part.