Acting gives you cosmic permission to take a trip in movies that lasts 24 hours a day, seven days a week, until the film is finished.

Very rarely do actors, even with features, get to live with a part for that long and really dig into it.

At my age, to still be able to do parts that are super physical, I'm lucky. I'm doing more fun stuff now than I ever have in my life. I'm just really fortunate.

I'm sure one reason I became an actor is my basic unwillingness to live one life.

That one long scene in the Leftovers I have with David Gulpilil was seven pages long. When we finished it, Mimi Leder said, "I thought you were gonna do this in bits and pieces. You just did the whole thing." And I literally couldn't remember the scene. It wasn't that I was in a trance. I said, "Just keep shooting takes until you see what you want." In 48 years of acting, which is also how long I've been married, that had never happened to me.

The hard part about playing 'chicken' is knowing when to flinch.

The third season of the Leftovers came along and Damon Lindelof sent me the script to Episode 3, and I called him up and thanked him for one of the greatest gifts I've been given. I had that script for almost two months, in the mountains in Idaho, before I even got on a plane and flew to Australia and went to the outback. He also told me to learn about the indigenous people in Australia and learn how to play a didgeridoo. It was just great. It was probably, in many ways, the best acting experience I've ever had.