What actors are good at doing is walking into a situation that should make you incredibly self-conscious and frightened and doing it anyway. That's the gig, pretending that you are comfortable.

The roughest part is showing up. Once you throw yourself into the scene, it's just great fun to let it all go and not be self-conscious, and stop questioning whether you're sufficient.

All modesty aside, I think I'm good at reading scripts. The way I read a script is as fast as I can, all in one sitting, and I don't read many of the stage directions. I only read enough stage directions to let me know where I am, because they're always so verbose and mostly horseshit. So I only read the dialogue, which allows me to see the movie in my mind's eye in real time.

I'm not religious. It's an issue, 'cause I've got two little kids, and I feel you can't grow up without knowledge of religion.

I've studied Stanislavsky, and Mamet taught Stanislavsky, and I studied with Sanford Meisner. But the part of the method that I think is the most fruitful is the method of physical actions. It all comes down to your objective: Nothing else counts except what you want. How you feel will take care of itself.

I do love comedy, but I'm not brave enough to tackle a script whose goal is to make you laugh. That's tough. The ones that can do it, I tip my hat off to them, but I don't have that kind of humor or mind.

One of the things I did early on in film was over-enunciate and talk too loud.