I'm just trying to be Emory Cohen.
— Emory Cohen
My first two or three films, all I was trying to do was look cool. That's all I knew acting was.
I told my father I wanted to act, and he stared renting all these classic films for me to watch.
I want to do a rom-com. For me, where I come from, it would be such a stretch.
I'm zero to a hundred in almost every facet of my life.
When I'm playing a bad guy, a lot of it is imagined: things I thought I wanted to do, but I never would do them.
I did 'Pines,' and everybody wanted me to be the bad boy. Then I did Tony in 'Brooklyn,' and everybody wanted me to be the sweet kid. So I just want to keep everybody on their toes. Basically, that was the thought process.
If I wanted to play it safe, I'd get a normal job with a secure paycheck.
I am constantly interested in people who society calls 'bad' because I don't like to just buy into something that everybody's going to say. I want to investigate that for myself. With a character, you get to fully investigate that emotionally and understand the parts of them that are in pain and scared and are good. That's human.
I come from an intense family - like, we're just intense people. Not bad people or anything, we are just very intense, and I have just always felt like people who weren't like that were just a kind of hiding it, like when I was really young in high school.
I'm shying away from getting lost in really bad movies for really good money.
I love a good loser.
I was 16 when I linked up with my manager - first person I ever auditioned for - and I've been in this ever since.
My family has artists, but they are all working artists. They are not movie stars. They don't get paid. I really respect that blue-collared ideology where they're just trying to make a living.
I'm a fourth-generation New Yorker. My family has been in New York for many, many years.
There are shows that have been prematurely canceled, but I don't know if 'Smash' was one of them.
After I did 'Brooklyn,' I did about five or six violent films in one way or another, and not always with me being the bad guy, but something violent about it to keep the street cred up, really.
I'm glad I chose more vulnerable work about what is love and what is freedom and those kinds of things. But there's something innate in me where I always come back to characters with an edge.
It's not like every actor needs to train, but an actor will either develop their process through training or through working.
Toronto is a special city, and the environment is perfect for the arts; free and alive. I'm a New Yorker, and Toronto reminds me of a much cleaner New York, so it's like coming home after your mom just cleaned your room for you; for me that's a lovely environment.
Everyone's inspired by Brando. When I started acting, my dad showed me 'On the Waterfront,' and I thought, 'That's the coolest guy I've ever seen.'
The old joke in my family is that the last person who isn't from New York was coming from Russia.
I'm kind of an all-or-nothing kind of guy.
I really respect people who are just getting by with their 9 to 5s.
When it comes to a love story, you're like, 'I've been in love before.' So it's closer to you than the other stuff, and for me, that can be less comfortable.
'House of a Thousand Corpses' by Rob Zombie - I love that movie. I really do.
That's what separates actors - I'll take any risk for a performance.
When I was a kid, I saw 'Peter Pan,' and I loved Captain Hook and the Lost Boys because they were the 'bad boys.'
I'll play a happy character, but most characters are driven by a pain or a fear. They are driven by something deep down, and most people are like that in the sense. And so, that's what interests me.
The hardest thing is for me to let the work go and let myself just live. Every actor is different; they each have their own strengths and weaknesses; trust and ease are mine.
