I try to be super careful. The danger is you can end up focusing more on what’s going on off-camera than on-camera. You don’t want to be entertaining for the sake of being entertaining. The work should be the work. If it resonates, it’s going to resonate, and then people are naturally curious about how you got to that destination. It can’t be about how you’re getting to it.

From a young actor’s perspective, you learn a new set of skills in any movie. I’m only six years away from drama high school. At 23 or 24 you’re learning every day. I was lucky not knowing any of the actors prior, really. There was this unifying ulterior motive to make the movie great. It felt good. Things have to be utilitarian. It’s the healthiest way to approach art and creativity, you know. No ego.

I don’t know if it’s a pressure, I do feel it’s a responsibility though. I was talking about this with Steve Carell, about how there was a general complacency in previous generations that everything was going along nicely and that ratcheted the stakes up really high. People our age are so much more engaged, and I think that’s a good thing.

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I think an Oscar nomination does open doors. I have been fortunate to have had some incredible roles since the movie. [Whether] the nomination had anything to do with that, I don’t know – I just know I am incredibly grateful to be getting the work that I am.

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I am content being alive now, no matter how fucked up our political and societal present is. I think regardless of who you are, when you are tempted by the romanticism of the past, you forget how fucked up so much of it was. Take the worse state of health care as a banal example. Or, far more seriously, how the US was before the civil rights movement—and after it, for that matter, too.

My world had flipped. But if I kicked it with my friends, things could still feel the same. I was trying to marry these two realities. But I don't even think I knew that was what I was doing. That dissonance was real. And thank God. Because I feel like if I'd caught up to it immediately, I would've been a psychopath or something.

My whole life I was Timmy and then as I got older, it seemed like Timmy was youthing me out, so it’s been Timothée since. I tried Timo and Tim, too. The real pronunciation is Timo-tay, but I can’t ask people to call me that; it just seems really pretentious.