In my heart of hearts, I love theatre. It's the joy and terror of putting a play on, the creativity of it. It is infinitely harder than film and television and more tiring. Your performance is heightened in the way it isn't with film.
I had a really, really hard time working with Aniston because I was so in love with her. I was infatuated. I was speechless - I'd get all bubbly and forget my lines and completely blank. It was so difficult.
The life of an actor is very hard irrespective of the continent you are in. It is doubly hard when you are only eligible for minority roles.
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.
I admire anyone who does stage all their life. It's so tough, and it also made me really appreciate how lucky I am with film. You have to do your own makeup with stage, and you have to do so many un-glamorous things.
My first time nude was with a woman director, so I thought it would be easy, but it wasn't.
I love babies - I love being with them. As for acting with them, it's kind of hard because they don't know how to act.
There's nothing hard about acting except the long hours.
I laugh a lot, especially between shots, and it's tough for me to control. There have been so many instances where my director had to request me to stop laughing and come into the mood of the scene.
When you act you realise acting is not that difficult - the other technicalities are, like the mark, angle, light, etc. So you just not have to memorise your lines but keep in mind the mark, the angle and light. It is difficult.
Technically, the green screen acting can be difficult because there's something worse than a tennis ball on the end of a stick; it's an Australian visual effects assistant running around a field with a cardboard dinosaur head on the end of a stick while wearing sandals.
At the worst it was eight hours of makeup, and I couldn't sit down; I was in this crouched position. [on the traumas of being an actor in full make up]
In my career, there have been three things that were challenging: playing gay; playing a Jewish woman; and playing Chekhov. The scariest part was playing Chekhov!
It was hard to do 'Vikings.' It was hard to do 'Copper.' Part of that was, like, there's dialect and other things.
Most, actually, German actors have like some speaking of French. So, the French wasn't the problem. But, I was having a problem with them doing my dialogue in English. And it wasn't a matter of fluency.
Acting doesn't feel good. It's not comfortable to feel all this stuff, it's not.
When you're on a movie and the production department says, "We need old photographs of you - your character - when you were 20-years-old." I usually tell them it's in storage or I had a fire. I go back to these old photos and there's never a good photo or they're of times that I'm so glad I'm out of. They have nothing to do with the character that you're playing, so it feels false. That's one of the hardest things for me in terms of looking back.
I think some actors are very smart and have the tools. They know how to disconnect themselves from the characters, but I think for a lot of them, it's very difficult.
A scene, a day of shooting, can often make you feel kind of stupid and inept because your one job is to anticipate and react and know what to go for.
I've played all these extreme guys, but playing an everyman type has its own challenges.
Most writers write haphazardly. The actor is fighting unjustified words all the time.
Working with children is a whole other ball game. They're like little animals. You have to keep the camera turned on them all the time. Sometimes it takes a 41-minute take to get one sentence out in a believable way.
I've had some rank auditions where I embarrassed myself to new heights, which is hard for me to do. I was never good at auditioning. There are a number of actors over the years come up the ranks who are horrific at auditioning.
It's hard enough to just be a good actor. When you're on set, there's everything going against you. There are walkie talkies going off, the camera is creaking and moving, there are boom mics, and you have to hit your mark and make sure you don't shadow the other person's face. It's a really technical process.
The scariest thing about 'Roy' was that it was sync sound. So, I had to worry about my diction all the more along with my emotions, acting, and my dialogues. That was very challenging because it pushed me to work on my Hindi, and in a good way.
