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.
— John Lithgow
As an actor ages north of 60, he tends to be in more father roles than anything else. It's generational. And it tends to be a relationship that fascinates people, the flawed relationships between parents and kids.
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.
Every time I see somebody behaving truly insanely in real life, I think, 'Yes! I'm not over the top after all!'
I loved growing up in Ohio.
I auditioned for soap operas and commercials; I remember auditioning for Lays potato chips. It was a sort of 'Mutiny on the Bounty' sketch, where Captain Bligh was torturing the crew by saying, 'You can only have one Lays potato chip,' and they all rise up.
I'm as vain as the next person, but I've made so much fun of myself over the years, and that's very salutary as you grow older.
When I was 13 years old, I went to visit my aunt and uncle in Washington, D.C., and they just deposited me at the National Gallery. I would go from Rembrandt to Picasso - I remember that experience so vividly.
Anytime a culture is in economic stress, ugly things start happening.
I was married very young. I lived a very middle class life. I was married at age 21, divorced at 31.
Voice work is fun. But about three-quarters of the things you enjoy about acting are just not there. You're not working with another actor; you're not working with an audience. You're just working with a bunch of writers and a microphone. It's very abstract.
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 won two Golden Globes, and there was a long, long period in between the wins. That might be explained by the fact that when I first won the award, for '3rd Rock on the Sun,' I satirically compared aliens on the show to the Foreign Press Association. And they did not take that well.
There is less difference than you would imagine entertaining little children and entertaining adults.
I look around, and 50 percent of the big-budget entertainment you are seeing these days is dystopian. This is the era of 'Hunger Games' and blasted landscapes and 'The Walking Dead.'
I do think - I always tell that to young people - go to college, do theater, work with an audience. Don't try to learn how to act in front of millions and millions of people. Don't make that your first ambition, to be on a sitcom or get into the movies. Learn who you are as an actor, and the best way to do that is to do it in front of an audience.
It's not always easy to be proud of your government.
I don't deal with the nuts and bolts of life.
I'm an avid Boston Red Sox fan.
Comedy is very, very hard to achieve.
When people are taking something extremely seriously, that's the time to take out the pig's bladder.
I've said no to a lot of things I'd like to have done. My agent has never seen anything like it.
My eagerness to please sometimes gets the better of me.
Money is just a low priority for me. I'm more interested in good work than a big bank account.
I'm a very slow and ponderous reader, but I'm dogged.
No villain thinks of himself as a villain, and that's the approach I always take.
I really prize and love great painting.
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.
You don't see many films about a long, long relationship.
I got to have a great big knock-down, drag-out fight with Sylvester Stallone. Every actor should have that much fun at some point. You can hit him as hard as you can, and it's never enough for him.
Growing up in an atmosphere of storytelling made me an actor.
I went to - I got a wonderful college education. I went to Harvard. In those four years, I accumulated a lot of knowledge, but I also created a kind of habit of learning that has stayed with me my whole life.
I grew up with this crazy upbringing of living many places and always being the new kid in town, not like a service brat where you're always going to school with other new kids in town. I was constantly arriving in small towns and going to school with kids who'd been together since they were in kindergarten.
Britain has a great sense of its own national pride. It's like the monarchy is the embodiment of that pride.
I like to rehearse and rehearse and have everything exactly calculated before we start shooting - probably to a fault.
I do all the cooking in the family. I cook Italian, mostly, pastas and roasts, and bit by bit, I'm learning how to bake. I think cooking is a gift to other people.
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 hairline is receding. So my days as a romantic lead - even though I've never had them - are behind me.
People have expectations from you - and the whole fun of acting is taking expectations and completely upending them. That's how you get laughs in comedy, and that's how you scare the daylights out of people in a horror film.
If you go through your life being completely truthful, everybody will hate you, and something I deeply fear is being hated.
My very first role was when I was 2 1/2 years old; I was one of Nora's children in 'A Doll's House,' with my father playing Torvald.
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 went to Princeton High School when I was very serious about being an artist.
An artist is always thinking of something else. My father was like that. He had this feeling of abstraction, and I do, too.
If you're an actor, you tend to fool yourself into thinking you're much younger than you are because you're playing parts and behaving like a child all the time.
'Love Is Strange' was just a beautiful experience in so many ways.
The Wodehouse language is so rich and detailed and hilarious.
The zombie is the new, sort of, archetype of our times.
The first long chapter of my career was almost entirely theater so that, by the time I was 30, 35, I sort of knew who I was as an actor, and I was gradually learning who I was as a human being.
There's no more private family than the royal family. People who can really only be themselves with each other. The rest of us just spend all our time fascinated by them.
