“As I got into middle school, I was really an outcast. But everybody was an outcast in middle school. I don’t know who got the idea to put all kids going through puberty together in a school and give them academic elitism and competition and pit them against each other.”
“As an actor, you don’t want to know the beginning and end to your character’s arc. It makes it more fun. You’re not playing the end. You’re playing it realistically. You don’t know where this character is going to go and what’s going to happen to him, which just makes it more interesting for the viewers to watch.”
“I love acting and will take all the time to continue to act. But sometimes I’d like to try my hand at directing.”
“I love Tom Wilkinson and Tommy Lee Jones as well as Jessica Chastain. But the person I look up to most, not because I identify with her roles but because of who she is as a person, is Sissy Spacek.”
“Toronto is actually way more fast-paced than L.A. – I find the fast-paced nature of Toronto a bit obtrusive. In L.A., I love getting up and going hiking and going to the beach – that’s L.A. culture and it’s awesome and I miss it. Toronto culture is wonderful, but I miss L.A.”
“I actually love woodworking. I’m just getting into it. And I love playing guitar, I’m a big movie aficionado, and I like hiking.”
“Sometimes animal exercises can help you get in touch with parts of yourself that you don’t access day to day. In my day-to-day physicality, I’m a little bit like a terrier. I’ve always been described as a dog. I’m kind of goofy and a little dopey looking sometimes.”
“I hope that one day, the world gets to a place where you don’t need to politicize your sexuality any more than someone needs to politicize their race – that we can just act and we can exist in this Zeitgeist, telling stories about one another.”
“I am full of optimism. The world hasn’t beaten it out of me yet. And I’m going to work very hard to make sure that they don’t.”
“Women have always been incredible. They’ve always been amazing.”
“There’s a thrill in flying by the seat of your pants – trousers, actually: ‘pants’ in English means underwear – because most shows don’t operate that way. Network shows are repetitive.”
“I’m a bit of a geek, and I really like ‘Buffy.’”
“One time, I was literally stopped on the street, literally and physically whipped around by this guy who looked at my face and was like, ‘Are you Felix?’ I looked very different then. I was like, ‘Yah… Oh, yah!’ I was stunned and slightly frightened.”
“You cannot collectively, as a society, decide that you are only going to represent one part of a minority. It’s like saying you’ve represented black people on television because you aired an episode of the ‘Cosbys.’”
“I just don’t know when, as a society… it sort of only became OK to represent gay people in the traditional sense, where they have a great job and well-adjusted parents and maybe a surrogate or adopted child. When was that the only way you could represent gay people?”
“I was one of those kids who kept trying on different skins in high school. I was very afraid to be myself around all of these kids, to really reveal any part of myself that was true, so I would try on different skins, try on different masks, hoping I’d hit on one that was cool or quirky or interesting enough that suddenly I would be OK.”
“I’m a unique person, as everyone is, but none of us has more of a right to existence or a right to specialness or uniqueness than anyone else.”
“I started acting professionally when I was about 17. I worked immediately, but a year into it, I did an independent film in Canada, and that started it all. It was proof that maybe I could do this as a career.”
“Television is blue-collar work. You clock in in the morning; you work 12, 13 hours – sometimes 18 hours if you’re doing ‘Orphan Black.’”
“The artistic side of a person is never narcissist; it’s always empathic. It’s always kind and compassionate.”
“I do a bit of work on my bum, but, like, I don’t have a Dylan Bruce bum.”
“From an acting standpoint, you’ve got to continue to trust your gut because, ultimately, only that will result in a better product, making the audience more happy and resulting in the right payoff.”
“I realized there’s a difference between creating a character and sustaining a character. The challenge that comes with sustaining a character is that you have this sudden impulse to think about all the things the audience liked.”
“There’s a reason why VOD is so popular. You don’t have to wait. There’s instant gratification.”
“Never stop training, no matter what level you’re at. Never, ever stop putting your talent under a microscope and asking, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah – I’m doing all this stuff right, but what’s wrong with my acting?’”
“I don’t win anything in life, you know what I mean? I was, like, the awkward kid who didn’t go to prom, but I did – nobody noticed, though.”
“I don’t know if you guys have ever kissed anybody in real life, but it doesn’t always go as planned. It’s not always pretty. It doesn’t always look like a movie. It usually looks more like ‘American Pie.’”
“I consume a lot of television and a lot of movies, and I love watching other actors work and am just very inspired by it.”
“I think that the worst thing as an actor is to fall into a monotony with characters.”
“I’m interested in telling a story about a gay man and what he’s going through as an artist and as a lonely, single gay man. I want to reveal what I know about loneliness.”
“For ‘Orphan Black,’ all I got was the pilot script, and that was enough for me. I was daydreaming about this part. I kept thinking about how certain scenes were going to play out and how these interactions were going to take place.”
“Even in the face of tragedy, human beings need to find a way to laugh. It’s normal. It’s life.”
“I’m a very political person. I’m a very opinionated person. I have a lot of opinions about LGBTQ representations in the media, and it’s not just a gay community issue. It’s a black issue. It’s an Asian issue. It’s a minority issue in general.”
“TV is art. It’s mass art. It’s accessible to the masses.”
“I learned that the acting I really like is when the actors did a lot of bringing themselves, and where they’re at at the moment, to the character.”
“I absolutely believed Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger loved each other in ‘Brokeback Mountain.’”
“I would never call myself an expert on geopolitics. I’m not studied in it. But what I do know is what’s right and wrong in terms of treatment of people.”
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