Another challenge? Getting up at 6:30 in the morning to go act. It's not fun acting that early in the morning or acting at 4 A.M in the middle of the night or in the morning when you're really tired. That's a challenge. What a luxurious problem to have.
Once, Naseeruddin Shah told me that the wafer shop was the best acting school that I could have attended. And I completely agree. I observed every customer very minutely and picked up some quirk or the other. Later, I used those experiences while playing different characters.
I haven't really focused so much on getting acting work.
I had all the usual ambition growing up. I wanted to be a writer, a musician, a hockey player. I wanted to do something that wasn't nine to five. Acting was the first thing I tried that clicked.
Our leaders are acting like lemmings.
As I've been acting since I was young it's taught me to give a good speech, and, though I say so myself, I did it pretty well.
I think my high-school acting career lasted a day.
Stage acting lets you feel the character a little better, but in the movies, you have to keep regenerating your energy level when shooting scenes over and over again.
To spend time with Ed Harris... he's an acting hero of mine, so that's a big deal for me.
Music is my love and to me acting is more mercenary. I don't pound the pavements for roles: if it happens, it happens. I hate that auditioning thing.
Acting is something different to everybody. I just know that if you watch an actor or actress getting better and better, I think that's them just understanding themselves better and better.
What attracted me to acting, from the start, was playing different characters. I'm not a massive fan of just playing myself on screen.
When I was younger and studying acting, I never ever saw myself in the sitcom world; it was drama that really turned me on and still does.
I drifted into acting, and I've drifted into my career, and I've never been guided by anything particularly concrete.
'12 Angry Men' has a truly great collection of actors giving fantastic performances. It's an acting masterclass.
When I'm recording my album, I want to be acting, or when I'm on set, I want to be making music. I guess we'll see how it turns out and which one overpowers the other... but I couldn't really see my life without them, both of them.
My parents are kind of young, and my dad always listened to rock music and stuff like that, so I sort of grew up around that. As far as acting goes, I didn't really have any major influences because it wasn't really something that I focused on.
Acting is my first love, and that's my main career, it really is.
The best preparation for acting is life - observing life and people and observing yourself. All that becomes your library. So when you have to research a part, a scene or an emotion, you go into the library and get what you need.
Working with Scorsese was an absolute dream, and one of my favourite ever jobs was 'Beowulf' because it was just pure acting. Your imagination explodes as you try to imagine you're fighting a dragon or whatever.
So when I told my parents I wanted to go into acting because I was flunking out of my first year of junior college, they were relieved that I had picked something other than joining the army. But I can't imagine how they had high hopes for me.
For the first six years of my career, I was relegated to those girl-next-door, sweet, cheerleader kind of roles, and it was really frustrating for me because you don't have to do much acting.
While making Genevieve, I learned there could be a lot more to a film than just acting in it.
I do remember when I was starting acting, going from one set to the next, with not much else going on in my life. And at the end of the day, you get back to your hotel room and just feel this awful loneliness, because the cameras have stopped rolling.
Sometimes I wonder if I would've been more successful if I wasn't acting and I concentrated on other things. But I love being on set. I love working with my 100 crew members.
The difference between the extras here and in France is the French extras read books. Actually, they hide the book and pretend that they're acting. Here, you can see everybody wants his break.
Acting is something that I always wanted, but I never paid attention to the notion that it might actually work out. You have all sorts of ideas about what you want to do - at one stage, I wanted to be a jockey - but this is the one that's a big deal.
I felt like the news business was a little rough for me and a little sleazy. So I glided right over into acting.
I had been acting since I was seven years old, but I had a combination of things happen at about the same time. 'Austin Powers' came out on DVD, I got a series regular gig on 'Buffy' and 'Can't Hardly Wait' came out.
I love movies, I've always been interested in them, but I wanted to wait for the right time to start acting.
I suppose I could be accused of taking acting too seriously and losing the fun of it. I do take my work very seriously; I take on the responsibility of it.
Acting is very immediate.
Acting kind of pays my bills more than music does.
The real exertion in the case of an opera singer lies not so much in her singing as in her acting of a role, for nearly every modern opera makes great dramatic and physical demands.
Voice acting is very creative, especially 'Star Wars' voice acting, because there's so much you have to imagine.
I want to be the Denzel of acting and the Michael Jackson of music.
