From the time I was five years old, theater was all I knew. I did community theater; I went to theater school. It's like going to the gym as an actor: every single night, you have to recreate the illusion of the first time, so you really have to listen and connect and stay in the moment for an hour and a half - with no breaks.
When I used to do musical theatre, my dad refused to come backstage. He never wanted to see the props up close or the sets up close. He didn't want to see the magic.
I was 16 at the time, and I came backstage and started hanging out with them. I said, "Well, maybe you can 'vanish' the silk this way." The opening was a black stage while the "Magic to Do" song started playing. All you saw were hands, lit by Jules Fisher, and then Ben Vereen would appear beyond the hands, and at the end of the scene he would vanish a silk. The spotlight would hit a red spot on the floor where you'd see the silk on the floor. He'd pull the silk out of the floor and it became the entire set coming out of the floor.
That's why I had to leave Hair on Broadway, because I did it for about a year, and one night I was doing the show, and I realized, well, this is not real. I told the director. He says, man, it was a killer show tonight.
In the theatre, once you've gone about eight rows back, everybody else is just listening to you. You're very small, and nobody can really see what you're doing.
You come in off the street, through the doors of the theater. You sit down. The lights go down and the curtain goes up. And you're in another world.
The joy we get as actors is out of transforming ourselves into something that's not necessarily anything true to ourselves. And it's a power - not being yourself, and being in the role; it's just like another prop.
I think most people's careers in theater are based on delusion. It's just that mine started early.
In a theater you can fool everyone past the tenth row if you're good, but on the screen you can't really fool anyone for a second.
