It's wonderful to play a villain who gets a laugh or to stop a comedy dead in its tracks with a touching moment. It's kind of like a symphony that has very different movements.

The zombie is the new, sort of, archetype of our times.

Will Ferrell is my new favorite person in the business. He's a completely adorable man.

My hairline is receding. So my days as a romantic lead - even though I've never had them - are behind me.

I am such a coward when it comes to political arguments. I tend to sort of recoil rather than engage.

I'm a very slow and ponderous reader, but I'm dogged.

I tell young people, including my own kids, don't do this, it's too difficult. It's a career full of rejection, disappointment and failure. It's murderously hard on the ego. Don't become an actor.

The way I approach acting when there's a real life character, it's sort of like a Venn diagram. What I come up with is some amalgam of the two of us.

Grown adults often tell me that they used to sit, as children with their parents, and watch '3rd Rock from the Sun,' and they would all enjoy it for completely different reasons. I think that's part of the magic of the show.

In TV and movies, you get known for a certain thing, and that's what's expected. Onstage, people are more open to whatever character you create from one play to the next.

I'm a very hopeful person. I mean, I'm an optimistic person, sometimes stupidly optimistic.

One of the things you learn as an actor is that human beings are capable of almost anything. I'm sort of in the business of illustrating that fact.

If a film is about love, it tends to be about tortured love or discovering love or young love. It's not this wonderful kind of comfortable, old resilient love.

I'd sleep under a Vermeer.

There's nothing like spending an evening with an audience every night.

Actors are not necessarily smart people.

I'm a lazy actor, lazier than you would think. I don't usually do a lot of research.

I was married very young. I lived a very middle class life. I was married at age 21, divorced at 31.

The Wodehouse language is so rich and detailed and hilarious.

I eat way too fast.

I work very hard on motivating everything I do as an actor. Explosive moments have to be completely motivated; whether they're explosive comedy or explosive horror, they have to come organically out of a scene and an interaction with another actor.

My sense of myself is that I'm a character actor, and character actors are ready, willing, and able to do anything, to be totally different from themselves. That's my job, to be ready. I'm some kind of first responder.

When I was a teenager, I remember the extraordinary feeling of accomplishment for completing 'Vanity Fair.' I don't think it was even for school.

I owe my whole career as a storyteller to my father. He was an actor/director/producer and teacher.