It used to be that you kind of got pigeonholed into one thing - you're either a stage actor or a TV actor or a movie actor. Today, there's a lot of crossover with film actors doing television, which never happened before, so those lines are a little bit more blurred than they used to be.
People on series are now given a lot more opportunities, sometimes more than film actors.
I've been shocked by film actors - 25 and under - having such confidence and cockiness to rewrite a scene. My background is more about the director being in control. It's all about yielding. It's an oddly submissive relationship in which you're moulded, Pygmalion-style.
You have film actors doing TV, rap stars doing TV, with everyone kind of crossing the line.
While you can be trained and groomed to be a better actor, seasoning happens only to TV actors. TV actors shoot every day, and that makes a difference to the project. They are hard-working, but that's not taking anything away from the film actors.
Whenever I think of the high salaries we are paid as film actors, I think it is for the travel, the time away, and any trouble you get into through being well known. It's not for the acting, that's for sure.
Some film actors want to sit back and look at every scene and all that crap. No, you're an actor - tell the story, and when it's told, there's another one to tell.
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.
New platforms are emerging: Netflix, Amazon, Hulu and Xbox. And film actors are gravitating towards television, because there are basically better roles there. Television is making the kind of epics and genres that the movie studios used to make, and often doing it better with more complex narratives and corresponding budgets.
Soap operas are like boot camps for film actors, so I really learned a lot. It was a masterclass in working for camera. I made myself watch myself every day. I would sort of try and be objective about it and critique myself a little. There's a lot more skill set than people realize in soap operas. They shoot, like, 35 scenes a day.
