I’m an actor, coming from New York theater.

As a kid I used to pretend I was John Denver, of all people, and play the guitar and sing Take Me Home, Country Roads.

There’s been a boiling down of real emotion into a set pattern instead of individualism.

I guess I’m a little charmed. I never thought this would happen so quick.

I’m not the most talkative guy in the world.

As an actor, you want to keep your demons to some extent, but you also have to exorcise them so you can use them instead of them using you.

Ultimately, it’s a pretty confusing moment.

I had built stuff my entire life, so I was designing and building and taking drafting. I would watch plays and got real interested in performing.

In this business, you’re either Brad Pitt right away, or you’re already going down the ladder.

Because of the need to remove all modernism, we stayed in the middle of nowhere all day long, living out of tents. It was cold. It definitely set the scene.

What’s the classical moment that every actor or actress deals with? A tragic thing. They get that blank, faraway look in their eyes. But in life, it’s not that way.

I had gone to school to study marine biology.

It’s become so much about personality. A lot of Hollywood, they don’t work on acting, necessarily. They don’t see you’re gonna fall, make mistakes.

Everybody else has been seen, been proven.

Whatever labels are being pinned on me have nothing to do with me.

I scored a 910 on my SAT. I didn’t care about education. I don’t know what I cared about.

My mom’s been married three times; my dad has been married a lot. I didn’t really see my dad that much.

Everyone’s really lazy in L.A.

I think I’m extremely vulnerable and that in some ways I seek out rejection. Never feeling like you’re getting that pat on the back from dad is probably at the heart of that.

My problem with interviews, one day I’ll think one thing, and the next day I’ll think the exact opposite.

Having people in the business say, You do good work, is part of it, and so is knowing that it’s true in my head, that I do good work.

I think people could justify labeling me if they saw a pattern in what I do, but right now that’s impossible.

She was pretty raw and technically she didn’t know what was going on and that’s understandable. So we sat back and laughed. We had all been there, we had all been the ones who didn’t...

People said, That’s great for your career, but what have you done? I kept feeling I had to defend myself.

I didn’t even go to my prom. I didn’t have one date in high school.

I think when someone becomes an actor, people say, Aw, you could see it in him when he was little. But I think you can see that quality in every little kid.

I think she was much closer to the character than she thought,

The more you understand me, the less characters I can play.

I don’t use the techniques I learned at NYU much anymore.

I think you have to refill the well at some point.

The thing that impresses me is that she doesn’t stand apart from the film. It all works as a whole.

The Native American side was tragic. It’s just unbelievable what has happened to them.

I feel like I want to crawl out of my skin, especially when people start questioning me.

I was nicknamed Skeeter in Little League because I was small and fast, like a mosquito flying across the outfield.

Ambiguity in directors is a hard thing to deal with.

The whole Indian thing, I always say it’s really the American holocaust. It’s something we need to look at.

I get to play a killer next.

I would take William H. Macy as a teacher any day of the week. He’s incredible. He’s got a lot of hard-earned experience.

Any time I got in emotional turmoil, I felt sick all the time, like at any minute I would die.

There’s a lot of reasons you can think of to say why you act, but I can only say that it just felt good. At the same time, it felt really painful. It’s still troubling...

I grew up in a small farming town called Concord, outside Charlotte in North Carolina.