The funny thing about being an actor is, at least from my point of view, you don’t spend a lot of time reflecting. You’re just on to the next thing. The work is so tricky to get sometimes. I’ve spent so much time just looking forward and trying to work on what I’m working on at the time that I don’t really think of myself as having done that much. Looking back on the resume it’s like, oh, yeah. An actor has a couple of lifetimes, I guess. I’ve been very fortunate. When you’re first starting out, for me anyway, I was a little shy telling people I was an actor. I didn’t have a lot of stuff on my resume. When you have one scene as a background guy in a television movie and call yourself an actor, that’s a little odd at first. Now I’m more comfortable with it. I’m really not aware of it until people bring it up. People that I meet in the professional world say, man you’ve been around forever. Really? I guess so. It’s great. I’ve been fortunate to work in all the venues: theater, and movies and TV and the subgenres of comedy and drama. I guess I am very, very fortunate.

I think that being an actor is a really good job. Of course, there are things you have to put up with. In order to create a real character from text on a page, you have to be extremely sensitive about various things, so it can impact one’s daily life. Apart from my talent, there might come a time when the public is sick of seeing me and wants to see less of me. I think that that time might come someday. That’s why I’m working hard right now. People ask me why I don’t take a break, but this time right now is too precious. I want to live each day as intensely as possible. As I passed 40, I thought that I should live without regrets. I feel like I’m living my life on sets. Right now, my entire life is on set.

I love the life of an actor because you spend brief amounts of time with other people and then you just leave. I need to be alone a lot, and I need the outdoors.

One of the things with actors too is that sometimes you don’t want to be contracted to do a role as an actor because if you’re reading for other pilots and you have an interest in something else or a producer is talking to you about a movie or a show that’s been pitched and they’re thinking it’s gonna go, you don’t want to lock yourself into a schedule. And no one ever talks about that. In fact, usually you’re not allowed to. So you just sit there, and people have all these theories, and you can’t really say anything because of non-disclosure.

The main thing is to remain yourself, and this is impossible for a professional actor. Although it is difficult to think ahead. It seems to me that cinema and music, complementing each other, can coexist in my life.

When you're not working and you're just living, you forget and all of a sudden something happens to remind you that you're an actor. I'm not always the nicest person to meet, because I forget very easily that I'm an actress when I'm not working. I live very normally, I go out with my friends, we go to the movies, I queue, we go to restaurants. Then if something happens to remind me that I'm an actress then I become a little different and things become a little heavy. I like the advantages; I know it's not right but I like being famous when it's convenient for me and completely anonymous when it's not.

One of the most difficult aspects of being an actor is trying to find the right work. Work that speaks to an audience, that you enjoy doing and that is reflective of your artistic sensibility. To be a contemporary movie actor, you have to kill people - that's basically it. If you don't cock'n'load'n'fire a Smith&Wesson at some point in your film career, you're not going to have a film career. There just aren't enough movies that I like to keep me working in movies all the time. Well, let me rephrase that: there aren't enough available parts.

I feel like you kind of have to live life to its fullest in order to be a good actor. Draw on experiences. The more experiences the better, and I really have had a lot of experiences in life, even at my young age.

When you’re on set, acting is like you’re in another world of your own; you’re coming to do this thing so everybody would see it, you’re doing it for the world. Acting is a wonderful thing if it’s in you and you work hard for it.

I quite like the transitions of being an actor, because you get to explore these little pockets of life. So if you’re playing a builder you get to know about building, if you’re playing a scientist or a physician or something you get to know about physics. And similarly with this world I like exploring their culture, that very sort of upper middle class, addictive… that’s part of the reason I love it.

It’s a hard industry. As long as you love acting, do it for the acting, not for making money. Be in it because you love playing other characters, and never stop growing. Study. You are going to learn a lot from everyone. Stretch yourself. It needs to be your passion, and not for fame. I have very lucky my whole life, and I just love acting so much. Embrace it and immerse yourself in it

The sun beats down and you pace, you pace and you pace. Your mind flies free and you see yourself as an actor, condemned to a treadmill wherein men and women conspire to breathe life into a screenplay that allegedly depicts life as it was in the old wild West. You see yourself coming awake any one of a thousand mornings between the spring of 1954, and that of 1958—alone in a double bed in a big white house deep in suburban Sherman Oaks, not far from Hollywood. The windows are open wide, and beyond these is the backyard swimming pool inert and green, within a picket fence. You turn and gaze at a pair of desks not far from the double bed. This is your private office, the place that shelters your fondest hopes: these desks so neat, patiently waiting for the day that never comes, the day you'll sit down at last and begin to write. Why did you never write? Why, instead, did you grovel along, through the endless months and years, as a motion‑picture actor? What held you to it, to something you so vehemently professed to despise? Could it be that you secretly liked it — that the big dough and the big house and the high life meant more than the aura you spun for those around you to see? Hayden's wild," they said. "He's kind of nuts — but you've got to hand it to him. He doesn't give a damn about the loot or the stardom or things like that — something to do with his seafaring, or maybe what he went through in the war . . ." Sure you liked it, part of it at least. The latitude this life gave you, the opportunity to pose perhaps; the chance to indulge in talk about “convictions — values — basic principles.” Maybe what kept you from writing was the fact that you knew it was tough. Maybe what held you to to acting was the fact that you couldn't lose — not really lose, because you could not be considered a failure if you had not set out to succeed... and you made it quite plain that you didn't give a damn. And yet, you did hate it. Perhaps you were weak, that's all. You hated it because you knew you were capable of far more. You hated the role of an actor because, in the final analysis. an actor is only a pawn — brilliant sometimes, rare and talented, capable of bringing pleasure and even inspiration to others, but no less a pawn for that: a man who at best expresses the yearnings and actions of others. Could it be that you thought too much of yourself — that you could not accept sublimating yourself to a mold conceived by others, anyone else on earth?

Don't let your flaws define you. Become who you are. Be the best version of yourself. If you're a nice person, just be nice. If you make art to please people or to make people like you—well, it's never going to happen. Before I was an actor, I was a human and a citizen. As an actor, your job is to inhabit different people's lives and honor their feelings and be empathetic to other people's struggles. Just because you are an actor, you are not immediately an activist. But if you do have the platform and the opportunity to speak out, then I think it is your civic duty—especially right now—to be on the right side of history. We only have so long on this planet.

I have always been attracted to difficult work, there really doesn't seem much point in looking for the easy life as an actor. I would simply get bored.