My wife thought I was Vincent Schiavelli, and we married.
Jeffrey Tambor
In Yiddish, we say, 'Nisht ahin un nisht aher.' It's neither here, it's neither there. I get more nerves than on anything I do when I'm doing multi-camera. But single-camera, I love very much.
Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is part of our constitutional rights and it belongs to everybody.
We have been treated gorgeously by Amazon.
Every family has that secret. Every family has that thing where you go, 'Shhh, shhh, shhh.'
There was a library near us in San Francisco. It was the West Portal Public Library. I would ask my father to drive me there at night and pick me up when it closed. I think he was worried about this routine but never let on. Also, I kept this a secret from my friends, as I don't think it would have been considered the 'coolest' habit.
Usually when you act, you know where you're going, where the point is.
I'm a Jewish son of Russian-Hungarian heritage parents. Humor was very important. My whole goal was to make my parents laugh. And my whole strategy as a young man was, if I could make them laugh, I could have enough time to figure out what to do next.
When I was growing up, there was a character on TV; there was a character stereotype: it was personified by Mel on 'The Dick Van Dyke Show.'
I really got used to playing Maura.
The honor of being able to play Maura is transformative. I'm 70 years old. I should be in a reading room, reading Dickens or something.
I worked at The Old Globe Theater under the great baton of Craig Noel. One of the great theater heroes that we have. He was so great and so inspirational. I think I did 'Antony and Cleopatra' and 'The Taming of the Shrew'. I lived in Ocean Beach, and my rent was $140 a month.
You just put your head down and do the work.
I actually got thrown into my Bar Mitzvah because my teacher, my Cantor, did not tell me that they would all say 'amen' at the end of each, for want of a better word, paragraph. And that threw me completely. I almost went into an Ella Fitzgerald sort of scat.
What's interesting about playing Maura is that I get to use more of Jeffrey that I've ever used in any role, and I think that's the remarkable part about it and truly the most surprising part about doing this role.
I think most of my heroes are not the traditional types. A guy I was fascinated with was Buster Keaton. I just love what he did. I love that mug.
The 'Hey now's' are delivered as people pass me. As I just get near ear range, I hear, 'Hey now!' and that's very funny.
If you see 'Pollock,' I weighed almost 270 pounds.
This whole thing about winning and losing is muddy waters. But I can remember, as a young actor, just walking around this city and not being able to get arrested.
I'm really aging myself, but I grew up with 'Playhouse 90' and the plays on the air - 90 minute plays.
Owning a bookstore was right up there with acting in life goals, but other than swaggering around the store, I'm not much use.
I would not be unhappy were I the last cisgender male to play a female transgender on television.
I thought I was gonna do Lear, but I'm gonna do Maura.
I've been in three sort of... I mean, I'd say they're groundbreaking series, if only because of the creators. One was 'Max Headroom', another was 'The Larry Sanders Show', and the third was 'Arrested Development'.
When I was a kid, we got up, we walked a number of paces to a television, turned it on, and changed channels.
I think I made $55 a week, and it was bliss... I was doing theater. It was all I ever wanted to do. It was so much fun, and you got paid for it, and you met people, and it's the greatest education in the world. And in my little Greenbrier station wagon, I felt very much like a troubadour.
I learned the biggest lesson just watching Ed McMahon, watching him watch Mr. Carson's monologue.
I am the Internet guy. But the reason the 'Onion News Empire' was such an easy decision to make is I so trust that side of the fence now.
I loved the gentlemanly way they treated each other. It was unlike anything I was used to. I started helping them strike the set and, at 11, began taking acting classes privately.
You see kids walking to the bus, and they're watching product on their phones. I'm positive that my grandkids and their grandkids are going to put on a pair of glasses and watch something.
I kind of like not knowing how to do something - it's more exciting.
There's a wonderful adage in acting that you're stuck with the character, but the character is also stuck with you.
I can't say enough about the guts and the talents of Amazon. They're so agile, they're so nimble; they picked us up two weeks after we premiered, and their whole attitude is, 'Go, go, go, go,' so I'm very, very impressed.
The real road, to me, was within the actor, within myself, within my own personality. How much Jeffrey can I find, and how much of Jeffrey could I access? What parts of Jeffrey have I never used for Hank or for George or Oscar? - and that was a delight.
You can send a lot of instruction through laughter.
I am a huge believer - I always have been - in the power of comedy. That comedy will break hatred and will bring understanding.
I think of everything as comedy, but I don't think of it in terms of sitcom comedy, I think of it in terms of Chekhov comedy. Chekhov called his plays comedies. There's always a mixture of a laugh with sadness. So the plie to the laugh is sadness.
So many people say they went to school on 'The Larry Sanders Show.'
There was one television in the living room, and we all sat around on Sundays and watched Ed Sullivan.
I came to New York late; I was already past 30.
My new toy is not knowing, because it's very creative. I'm the guy who likes to get in the car and get lost.
You want to feel, 'I know that character.'
When I did the pilot, Mort was very real to me. When I got through with the ten weeks, Maura is even more real to me.
I did not know that you had to learn makeup. I just thought you went, 'Oh, I'm gonna put on some makeup.'
I think shows being sent out this way - pressing a button and 10 episodes can go out to the U.S.A., and the U.K. and Germany, it's very cool.
I love this company. I don't know how it was selected. It's a bunch of machers. They mean business.
The Emmy should be an ensemble award, too. I kept howling at everyone else's performances.
As my manager says, 'These are wonderful problems.'
My part had three lines. I said, 'You look wonderful, sir,' three times. All my friends said, 'Do not take that role - and do not understudy. You'll regret it the rest of your life.' I did both of those things, and I've never regretted it once.
And I'd watch George C. Scott from backstage. He was one of my mentors.
