That's probably the biggest secret of acting: If the actor believes it themselves, they can make you believe it.

As an actor, you live a little bit of a cloistered life. It's a lonely life. You oddly, strangely find yourself all alone, quite often, with a lot of time to think.

I'm very old-school. I like a director to direct me. I like to be the actor. I'm not particularly fond of the hybrid writer-director, or actor-director. Writers, directors, actors are all such very different people. I think it's unusual that two of those people are in one human.

You can't really gauge the difficulties of television. There's difficulties and joys that happen with an amazing, great team, when one is working. Television can be a very frustrating job for almost anybody working in television, because you're shooting episodically, and you don't know one scene from the next, and maybe they change around.

I think the funny thing about acting for me - and I hold it in a very holy, spiritual way - not to be overly fundamentalist about it, but it's that important to me - is that it is an ancient healing art.

I'm very, very serious about what I do. I think there are a lot of people out there sort of thinking it's anybody's game. You know, "You pick up a camera and you make a movie." My experiences over the years have taught me there's a lot more than that to making a film - there's also getting the film seen, and all kinds of complex realities.

It becomes more and more popular to call actors who play characters "character actors." But I've always been somebody who is much more invested in who I am playing than how they look.