People evolve and it's important to not stop evolving just because you've reached 'adulthood.'
I don't think I've ever watched a movie to prepare for a role.
Fortunately, for the first 20 years in my career, I didn't have any other responsibilities outside of myself. I didn't have a wife and kids, so I could afford to sort of barely scrape by, to do theater.
I'm just glad to be able to work.
I want to be like Bradley Cooper when I grow up.
By the time I started doing TV and film, I was in my forties, so I wasn't going to do the young up-and-comer.
I've always believed, maybe naively, that 'The play's the thing.'
I actually have a degree in music and was aware that music was a tool used in therapy. I didn't realize how far it had come since I was in college in the mid-seventies.
Whether you need to like a character, I don't think that's necessary in order to portray him.
I had many, many mentors that I worked with. Music teachers, choir directors, directors in summer stock or in regional theater. You know, people I was able to work with repeatedly and learn from who were really sort of appropriate people for me to work with at a given time in my development as an actor.
We're raising a generation of kids who are being overly praised for incredibly minor accomplishments. I think it's counter-productive.
I started out as a singer and a musician, and I was taught that your job is just to get out of the way of Brahms or Arthur Miller or Shakespeare and convey the brilliance that they created.
I went from being a jock to a hippie. It was a very clear-cut decision. I had to be one or the other. I had to forsake that other aspect of myself. Or thought that I had to, which is regrettable. Quickly, I was back in the pine trees with the hippies, listening to my Jimi Hendrix and my Janis Joplin and turning on, tuning in, and dropping out.
I don't often do a lot of that kind of research, but when it's something specific like 'Oz' - which I fortunately did not have a lot of experience with - I will. I read 'The Hot House,' about being on the inside at Leavenworth prison.
My overall quest is always to do something that's somehow different from whatever it is that I just got done doing. If that can include occasionally playing an older guy who has a romantic side and a romantic relationship, than that's a real treat.
For me, the lean times were a wonderful, beautiful time of my life, struggling for many years in regional theater all over the country for not much money.
I wasn't a comic book aficionado at all when I was a kid, but my cousin Weed was. Every time we went to visit him on the farm, he had two really fun things: comedy albums and comic books.
I would like to thank the 49 actors who appear on screen in 'Whiplash' for realizing Damien Chazelle's vision so beautifully.
I never listened to the Grateful Dead as a teen; the only exposure I got was what came through the walls when my sister was listening to them.
I like to act. Every other aspect of show business I find uninteresting.
