In New York you go to the coffee shop, have a bagel, walk down the street, get hassled, run into someone else. People just waltz into your world and it's believable.
Brad Hall
'Saturday Night Live' is a whole different arena. It's great fun and I love it and that's what we do in the Practical theater. I believe in it wholeheartedly and will do it the rest of my life. But there's also legitimate theater, be it comedy, drama, classics or modern plays which I think is important and something I want to be involved in too.
Comics and actors come from such a wide variety of backgrounds and there's a theory that all comedians had tortured youths.
No one remembers this because it's the whipping boy, but 'The Single Guy' was very well-reviewed and watched, and then the central concept became attacked by the very people who were putting it on. And then the next thing you know you're running in fear, and everyone stops being funny.
Julia is one of the most loyal people who ever lived. Her best friend is her best friend from third grade, and her other best friends are her best friends from Northwestern. Once you're a pal, you're a pal for life with Jules. I'm not just flattering her because she's my wife.
When you romanticize something so extraordinarily in the hopes that it will divert you from agony, you're destined for a letdown.
On every show I've ever done, one of the first network notes is, 'You have to put a time clock on this thing.'
TV shows about TV were taboo for a while.
Hugh Grant is really the perfect actor for romantic comedies. Anything he does is invariably charming.
It's nice to be able to sit down and have a discussion about something for more than four minutes, and not look at your watch and go, 'Oh my God, I just spent $40,000 of HBO's money.'
If you're on Thursday night at 8:30, because the history of that time slot has been so disastrous, there's a hell of a lot of numbers pressure.
When I go to see theater, I'm consumed with professional jealousy.
It all depends what you look like. If you look like hell and walk down the street, they think you're just another bum. If you're being cool, you TV people don't get recognized. But if you're going to sign autographs and records, then you'll have some trouble.
You have to run, an awful lot, on instinct. Even on 'Veep,' it's not like you get weeks of rehearsal to break out what's going on in the scenes.
Those regrets that I do have are, exclusively, not doing plays that I wish I had done.
The truth of the matter is that it's not much less work to do a short than it is to do a feature. Particularly when you're running around different countries.
I could have been a mediocre tap dancer.
If you drugged me with truth serum and said I can only do one thing, I would probably have to say that I would be an actor in the theater. And then I would have you arrested for drugging me.
I don't have a lot of lifetime regrets, and very few show business regrets, surely.
I like the compressed nature of the story telling.
I can do a Green Day joke and people actually get it.
Audiences want to see people break rules for love, to challenge the fates for love.
Audiences know the form in their bones, they know that romantic comedies end in an uplifting way.
In New York you can actually run into people on the street, unlike in California where you're always in the car.
People are a lot more tolerant when they're home watching TV and they're looking for a laugh.
I think the fact that I'm married to Julia, people like to take shots at me.
The casualness with which people say hello to Julia on the street is hilarious to me.
I've had situations before where there are more people giving notes than there are writers on the show.
I mean, if you look at all the great romantic screwbally kind of movies from the '30s and '40s, they're all in New York. Even 'Sleepless in Seattle,' a movie about Seattle, ends up in New York, of course. The whole country, even if they've never been to New York, knows about it... from the movies.
You start out as an artist in some way or other. And my background is all theater, and I goofed into doing TV comedy.
It's a really special skill to be able to pick up a phone the way that a human picks up a phone. It's not as easy as you think.
I was very, very happy in Chicago as an actor making $168 a week.
I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that I have an unbelievably beautiful, well-known wife. And the people who criticize me don't.
Marjorie Luke was funny and huge, or at least I remember her that way.
My first performance was as one of the orphans in 'Oliver!'
The theater was the place where I felt my first crush, and it's where I got my first kiss.
New York is just such a perfect place for romance.
There is a dark side to being single in a great big city like New York. There's this sense of isolation and I think you can get fairly desperate.
