It's great to be able to have your feet in both worlds. I wouldn't want to be just stuck in one or the other.
No matter how many people tell you, Save your money, when you've got a series, you never do. Somehow it doesn't seem important. Maybe it's because you've been without money for so long as an actor.
I had almost no money, but with the little bit I had, I got a ticket to see 'That Championship Season' at the Booth theater.
Everything is interesting to me.
To this day, that's what I love the most: finding and playing characters who are out of my experience.
In my first film, I was a basketball player. Like every good actor, I lied when they asked me if I could play.
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 don't like talking about myself. I'm not really interested in myself. One of the good things about being a supporting actor is that you get to talk about other people.
Because I'd only done theater, that's really what I thought most of my life would be. I always figured that movies would be a part of it at some point. I didn't know how or when.
I have a DVD player and I have DVDs, and I have no time to watch any of them.
I was getting to the point where I said to my wife, 'I don't think I'll ever be in New York in a play again.'
In high school, I tried out for every sport there was. But none of them would have me. When I was a freshman, someone asked me to go audition for a play with them. I got in and didn't want to do anything else for the next four years.
With repertory, you had to play all these different characters. The range of roles is really what I fell in love with, every night getting to become somebody different. That was my idea of acting, getting to be part of the company and a family.
I want to talk about my very first play, when I was in eighth grade. One day, my English teacher, Mrs. Baker, announced that we were going to read 'On Borrowed Time' out loud in class. I was a mediocre student; I was terrified that she was going to call on me, so I hid my head.
I gave up planning when our children were born, when I had three children to feed and a roof to keep over our head and all of that. Early in my career, I said I would never do television at all; then I wound up doing nothing but television for 10 years when I did 'St. Elsewhere' and all those TV movies.
I've had the chance to work with Christopher Plummer, one of the great stage and film actors, a couple of times, including on 'Prototype,' the first TV movie I ever did. It was science fiction in the Ray Bradbury sense, written by the famous team who created Columbo, Levinson, and Link.
You get to the middle of a take that's going really well and the camera will run out of film. They have to stop you, apologize and then you've got to get things going all over again.
I've done scenes in films that I felt like the performance was better in certain takes, but they couldn't use them because it didn't match what the person was doing when they came around and the camera was on them.
I don't even know what TV star means. I know there's a difference in how people approach you, compared to movies. They feel OK coming up to you and sitting with you in a restaurant, unfortunately.
Home wasn't a pleasant place to live, growing up.
