“We live in a world where people can ridicule you at the push of the button. They can question you at the push of a button.”

In television you don’t have a lot of time to spend with the role or the script. Typically you get a script a week prior to shooting. Sometimes it’s even less time, not enough time to dream about the role.

The industry looks for white actors and actresses, but it’s not the same for black actors. We have to really put the work in.

I wasn’t a comic book geek as a kid. I read some, but it was just like, ‘Oh, I have this comic book here.’ It wasn’t like I was collecting them.

When you’re doing a character, you want to know the full landscape. You want to know them spiritually, mentally and physically.

People have said, ‘You don’t need to do any more biopics. You don’t need to play any more real people.’ I don’t agree with that.

I’m not really interested in being a superhero. That’s not a box I’ve been trying to check off.

Baseball players need strength but also the ability to make fast-paced, explosive movements, so their training is all about strengthening the tendons around the bone and the joint so you don’t tear the muscles from the bones.

I got scars from every film I’ve done, every TV show.

Guys are natural problem solvers – they like to have strategies.

Our lives depend on vote.

You think you can’t change the world? You can.

One of the first things I was taught as an actor was, ‘Don’t judge the character.’

Nobody has to give me permission to write.

They should probably have a James Brown aerobic tape. You would lose a lot of weight.

When you play characters, you shouldn’t just be putting on their characteristics – you should be finding it inside yourself.

You’re not free unless you can show the good and the bad, all sides of them. So to me, when I play a character, it’s important that I can show every aspect of them.

If the first button of one’s coat is wrongly buttoned, all the rest will be crooked.

The man upstairs is pushing the buttons, and if your name happens to be on that button, well, thank you.

On a sea floor that looks like a sandy mud bottom, that at first glance might appear to be sand and mud, when you look closely and sit there as I do for a while and just wait, all sorts of creatures show themselves, with little heads popping out of the sand. It is a metropolis.

Maybe I’ll make a huge color tapestry from my belly button lint.

I would be able to infer, form the shape of that button

After all those years of doing remote detonations, where we just push a button and something explodes, to actually see a nice big fat line of black smoke heading toward something that will blow up is very satisfying.

And he must be allowed the space, the freedom to express himself in the role. Without that space, an actor is no more than an unthinking robot with a chest-full of push-buttons.

Decide that you are no longer be a button that can easily be pushed to react.