I can do Shakespeare, Ibsen, English accents, Irish accents, no accent, stand on my head, tap dance, sing, look 17 or look 70.
I think a handful of the roles that I've gotten to play are characters whom I've lived that are like younger versions of me but who are maybe more naive and a little bit wilder than when I was. And I've gotten to play 16 and 17 when I was a little bit older, so I got to pull from experience.
I do very little on-camera acting, so within a phrase as a voice actor you have to know how to convey when someone is 95 years old or 19 years old. . . When I was the lead singer of the California Raisins commercials there was a traditional actor there as well and he would do all these body movements without saying anything because he was "acting." And the only acting the microphone picked up on was silence.
I don't think films about elderly people have been made very much.
That was the hardest thing for me. When it was published that I was going to play Tommen, all the fans of the books were like, 'Oh, he's turning 16' - that was the hardest thing: to play younger and show that.
Older actors can still play young, but it's harder for young actors to be able to play that age range.
We did a thing that we would call we call 'hirstories.' H - I - R - S - T - O - R - Y. I would enact a young Mort. And that always felt - it was so funny - it felt more difficult than playing Maura.
I can play younger. It's better to be playing younger because you've got that experience, and it's hard to play older when you're younger.
I want to play a role of a 24-year-old woman, not 17-year-old girls. So I have picked a couple of films like 'Butter' to show that. And it's perfectly fine not to do anything for a year if I don't find the right thing.
To play an older woman, 'til the look is not affected, it is never a problem for me. To play a matured character, it's different. You get to learn so much. It becomes more serious.
One doesn't necessarily have to be grey-haired to portray a mother.
Every actor starts out saying, 'I can play anything in the world: I'm only 25, but I can be a man 70 years old. I'll put on a gray wig and do it.' But nobody hires you for that. You have to play yourself on the screen.
You can play older than yourself. You can play younger than yourself up to a point, and then that just becomes impossible because you carry a weight with you that you can't shift, unless you have very boyish looks.
As far as aging on screen is concerned, I am sure the TV audience don't go by stereotypes - they have evolved and become smarter over the years.
