You can't plan everything - if I did a performance exactly how I rehearsed it, it would be so boring.
When you do a play, you have all this time to rehearse and grow into the character. In television, even though you're waiting and waiting and waiting, once you're actually on set engaging in the scene with another actor, time is of the essence.
I don't like improvising on camera, particularly, but very often, a scene will not be working, and you rehearse it once or twice, and you realize something's missing. So I'll play with it until it makes sense.
The improvisational nature of jazz musicianship is such that a truly competent performer must be prepared to function as an on-the-spot composer who is expected to contribute to the orchestration in progress, not simply to execute the score as it is written and rehearsed.
This is how I define grace: you're on the main stage, and it looks like it has been rehearsed 100 times, everything goes so smoothly. That's where I get my confidence and success, from knowing that I have an edge because I know I'm prepared.
Miss Fontanne and I rehearse all the time. Even after we leave the theater, we rehearse. We sleep in the same bed. We have a script on our hands when we go to bed. You can't come and tell us to stop rehearsing after eight hours.
Film is a lot different. You have the whole script in its entirety, and you have a couple of weeks to learn different scenes, really go over them and rehearse them so when you get to them they're more fleshed out. But TV shows are harder.
It's a very insular world, ballet. I feel if I had stayed much longer, it would've consumed me. I performed six days a week and rehearsed 10-plus hours a day. And you only see the people that you work with.
As much as I dislike Trump, I have to admit that his campaign took off because he seemed real and unscripted to a lot of voters. He wasn't rehearsed, senatorial, or buttoned up. That resonated with people who are distrustful of today's politicians.