I believe that you become a better actor only when you work with people far better than you are.
The hardest achievement in acting - in my opinion, anyway - is nailing a role that absolutely nobody else could have played. Pacino owned Michael Corleone... but DeNiro could have owned it as well. Who else, though, but Val Kilmer could have nailed Jim Morrison? Does anyone besides Will Ferrell pull off Ron Burgundy?
If one thing that bothers me about acting, it's that there's no clear-cut number one. The closest you can get is winning an Academy Award, and I'm going to work on that if it takes me the next 50 years. To my peers, it will mean that I'm the best!
I'm proud of doing 'Long Day's Journey into Night,' for which I won an ACE award.
If someone really takes a risk, it doesn't get dismissed. That's what happened when the Oscar was won posthumously by Heath Ledger, who did one of the definitive villain performances of all time. But it really has to be exceptional in defining everything we previously knew about the actress or the actor.
You can't, or you shouldn't, be nominated for an Oscar unless you've turned in a performance that's special.
Every year, you can depend on having at least a couple really exciting Nicole Kidman performances, and that's a rare thing.
One movie I think is just terrific is 'Bernie,' with Jack Black and Shirley MacLaine. That was a great surprise to me - so witty, so entertaining, a true story, and I'm not a great Jack Black fan, but he's great in it. I think it's a gem.
Good acting is good acting, whether it's on stage, on TV, or in films.
There's something very fine and lucid and rich in this tradition of the English actor.
I gave John Wayne the push he needed to get that Oscar.
How do you say one actor is better than another actor? You can definitely say that in the Olympics if it's the same race and someone wins the race. The only way to really do it and have it be sincere would be if you get all the actors together, and they're all playing the same part, and then you rate which one made you feel the most.
In England, with all due respect, we have some of the plainest actresses in the entire world as our greatest.
The acting in 'Downton Abbey' has been consistently excellent across the board.
I'm not Meryl Streep. My God - she's the greatest actor that ever lived. It's sad that ordinary actors like me are compared to her.
I don't want to infantilize the actor; I want to empower the actor. Actors can be many things, but all of the really good ones are really great storytellers, and I'm interested in that. If you're not interested in that as a director then you better be Stanley Kurbrick.
Daniel Day-Lewis and Sean Penn to me are the two best actors of all time. I'm just glad to have the pleasure to be in an era that they're acting while I'm acting. They're probably the best actors in my mind.
In 'Padmaavat,' you are pushed to be as good as the frame, to have a presence that lives up to the grand, operatic, intricate, beautiful frame that you inhabit. I love trying to rise to that.
I really am having the time of my life. But as far as my future goes, I want to stretch myself as an actor in a way that Jake Gyllenhaal, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Meryl Streep do.
Pransaab was a great character actor. What he has achieved as an actor, I cannot think of achieving even a part of it.
I know that I'm a decent actor, but it's another thing to be in a scene with Jon Hamm and hold your own.
Only a certain breed of actor should ever even try to work for Orson Welles. I'm glad I'm one of that breed.
For as long as I can remember, my acting crush has been Meryl Streep.
I trained as an actor with Lee Strasberg, Elia Kazan, and Harold Clurman, and those guys set a very high bar.
I would be surprised if they gave Meryl Streep her third Oscar for a film as light as 'Julie and Julia,' although, of course, Katharine Hepburn's third Oscar came with a very light performance from her in 'Guess Who's Coming to Dinner.'
