To be a good actor you have to be something like a criminal, to be willing to break the rules to strive for something new.
Actors work with their look. I come from the Lon Chaney Sr. school of acting. I'll wear wigs, I'll wear nose pieces, I'll wear green contact lenses in my eyes. I'll do whatever I need to do to create a character.
There's a fine line between the Method actor and the schizophrenic.
For me, acting was a way of taking destructive energy and doing something productive with it, and in that way it was quite a life saver.
In the beginning my energy and passion for acting came from an almost punk rock need to express a lot of anger wherever that may have come from. As I got older, it became or is coming more from a place of wanting to use the craft to help others in some way, to hold a mirror up to the situations that we're going through, to actually be more cautious about the way that I use the power of film and to see if there's anything that I can do in the performances that will resonate in the public a similar string that's on people's minds and is on my mind. That way we have that relationship.
I always wanted to find a way to apply my acting in a big mad monster movie where I was transforming into this scary entity.
Acting is like any other art form, in that you have the option to go very big or go very small.
I got into film acting because I wanted to be James Dean. We lost him at a very young age - he was only 24 - but I’m 51 going on 52, so there's only so many times you can act like James Dean. I had to find new ways of expressing myself that kept me fascinated with film performance.
My mother was a dancer, so I like to use the body as part of the instrument of acting.
I'm not an anarchist any more. I still love the Sex Pistols, but I don't want to be a punk rocker all the time, but I do want to carry on exploring new forms of acting.
Acting is always at the core of my life, but I'm also excited about producing. I'm excited about directing, and I have a life in the filmmaking world, and so I want to explore all aspects of it, not just the acting, but acting is the root.
Film acting is one of the only industries where you're criticized for working hard. In any other industry, it's considered a quality and something to behold.
I hit the ground running, without a lot of training, so I had to do whatever I could do to survive as a professional, and if that meant being that character 24/7 and acting out, I was going to do that. I lived those characters, I brought them home with me.
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