Quotes

[To Conan O'Brien] I heard you call me immature earlier. Well, you're just a big poop-head.

[about his portrayal of Harvey Fierstein on Saturday Night Live (1975), and Fierstein's response to it] I did Harvey Fierstein. He didn't like it. He came in to the show to complain about it. His point was that he was getting more famous as me than as him . . . He came in to talk about it and, watching him, I realized that I was doing him quite well. He thought I was doing a gay stereotype.

At a certain point, if you work really hard and you get good and people like your work, you do deserve the fame -- but you shouldn't take it for granted.

I like getting up in front of an audience. It's fun when you go to a baseball game and the crowd is cheering you. I can't deny it. And it's very funny, too. Sometimes you're shy; you go somewhere and everyone's looking at you, so you feel a little self-conscious.

(2010, on Tales from the Crypt in the episode "Top Billing") That was really fun. John Astin and Bruce Boxleitner were in it. I remember Joel Silver was producing the series and he asked me to do it. I had the lead, and when you have the lead, it's fun. I was playing a struggling actor, and it wasn't that long after I'd been struggling-maybe five years. I remember thinking, "I have to lose some weight. I'm too fat! I don't look like a struggling actor." I weighed 145 in high school; when I was in New York, when I was 24, I weighed 136 pounds. I didn't have much money to eat.

(2010, on Happiness) Todd Solondz was trying to decide if I would play that part or the part that Philip Seymour Hoffman played. I met with him once to talk about it. I didn't think I got it, and then five months after that meeting, they said he wanted me to play that scene. Here's the thing about that scene: It's very, very well written. A lot of times I get a scene, it's not very well written, and they'll say to me, "Can you add jokes? You've got to punch it up." And I don't mind doing that, but I kind of do, because I want to say, "Would you do your job? You didn't hire me to write the thing. Come on." This thing, though, was like Shakespeare. It's hard, because now you have to raise yourself to the level of the writing. It's like playing an easy piano piece like "Chopsticks" or playing Tchaikovsky-or Liszt or George Gershwin. It's fantastic, and it's very hard to play. I think it's a brilliant scene, but I don't take credit for it. It's like some guy wrote a great musical piece and goes, "Can you play it?" That scene is really funny and really sad at the same time, and it goes back and forth. It was hard to do-and it was hard to do because my character breaks down and cries. That's in the scene. It goes, "Breaks down and cries." So I had to cry all day for 12 hours, and I kept thinking of more and more sad stuff. Then it wouldn't work and I'd try something else. At first I'm crying about the scene. Then I'm thinking about a girl leaving me. Then I'm thinking about my dad-who's dead-waving to me. On and on, trying to make myself cry. By the end of the day I was exhausted, and then I was depressed for like two weeks. Because it's not real, but physically you're crying for 12 hours. Even though you're making it up, you're still doing it. Your body doesn't know that it's not real. Imagine for 12 hours-or even for 10 minutes-you have to cry and cry. It was hard... Everyone goes, "What's Todd Solondz like?" And I say, "Well, if Penny Marshall and Woody Allen had a kid, it'd be Todd."

(2010, on Trapped in Paradise) Well, I feel like I'm very fortunate to be in movies at all, but I called it Trapped In Shit. I love Dana Carvey, and Nicolas Cage was great and we became friends, but the director [George Gallo] just wasn't there. He wasn't directing. It was a bad time in my life personally, because my father had just died Dec. 25. And I'm up in the snow with no light-we did night shoots for six weeks. It was like 25-below. Everyone was fine, but after six weeks, the whole crew started going crazy 'cause there's no light. It really affects your mood. Then we moved to Toronto, so we're shooting inside. It wasn't fancy, but inside during the day, this was a luxury. It was like 31 degrees, but it felt like summer. So as soon as I worked during the daylight, my mood changed... But the director would say, "Just do whatever you want." He was bragging about what a great director he was before he hired us: "I'm as good as Rob Reiner and Martin Scorsese." This is George Gallo. I said, "Don't you think you should let other people say that?" We never even got to read the script. He'd go, "Well, let's rehearse this." I'd go, "Oh good, we get to rehearse." And he'd start screaming at me, "Do whatever you want!" And I go, "Saying 'do whatever you want' is not direction."

(2010, on landing Big) Penny Marshall gave me the part in Big. She goes, "You can improvise again." So I get on set and I start trying to improvise and she goes, "No, you can't do that." I said, "Penny, the part's nothing. You said I could." She said, "I know, but the writers don't want you to." I go, "Then what am I here for?" She didn't want me to do anything-just play it totally straight. I go, "Crap. I'll just be subtly funny. I'll sneak it in." And later on she goes, "See, that's why I said that. So you would do that." I worked on it for about a week, and one day I said, "Listen, I feel really sick. I think I'm going to throw up." She goes, "All right, well, try." We're doing a scene, and in the middle they go, "Cut," and I ran and threw up. I said to her, "I can't work anymore." I was sick as shit. So I went home, and I had the flu bad for about a week. And then I felt better, and I thought, "Maybe I should call her up and tell her I'm feeling better, see if she wants to put me back into the movie." But then I thought, "Ah, forget it! The part was nothing." And then it turns out to be this huge hit, and I'm like, "I'm an idiot."