I don't really know of the Jewish tradition of comedy, only the Jewish tradition of not keeping your mouth shut. Complaining about all that is hard, unfair or ridiculous in life-having strong feelings, and not being able to suppress them. That, to me, is Jewish.

Though I acted in hundreds of productions, appeared at the Guthrie Theatre and on Broadway in Amadeus, I discovered in my thirties that I didn't really like stage acting. The presence of the audience, the eight shows a week and the possibility of a long run were all unnatural to me.

It probably goes without saying that I enjoy the potato pancakes, delicious hams and so forth that maddeningly turn up at this time of year.

I always think of the character as being me. But me wearing a 'coat', which may be a different way of speaking, moving or regarding other people. To me, acting is pretending, just like kids playing, only you pretend as if it were really, really real.

I've always thought that, in a sense, the more specific and sometimes even the smaller the world of a movie is, the more universal it is.

I'm one of relatively few stage-trained actors who doesn't much like acting on stage. It feels kind of like riding the Cyclone at Coney Island, which I did when I was eight. When it was all over, I was glad I had done it, but most of the time when it was actually happening, I was just kind of hanging on for dear life.

The voice-over world has changed radically in the time that I've been in it. It used to be this rather small, select group of people who did 90 percent of the work. Now it's kind of the reverse: 90 percent of the work is done by this very broad mix of people all over the country, and the guys who used to be the go-to guys are a much smaller percentage now. But there was this massive interest in voice-over as well as in the story, so I think that also added to the film's appeal.