John Goodman

“Actors are there to entertain people. We’re not up there to feel anything; nobody’s interested. Peter O’Toole told me that when you get the script, you just perform as though you were late for a train. Don’t get caught “acting”. Read the script over and over, the character finds its own voice. That’s the way it’s supposed to happen—something happens inside you that changes the way you read the script. That’s the character speaking to you and you gotta listen to him, let him out. Don’t fight it. Relax. It’ll be over in a minute. I remember finding myself in the middle of a drama department that I thought I wouldn’t be able to crack. And the more I learnt about the basics of acting, the less I cared about anything else. It was about self-expression through interpretation of someone else’s art, finding my own voice that way. I haven’t done comedy in a long time, intentional comedy. There’s a great sense of achievement because it’s so damn hard. There’s a lot of ingredients to doing it and it’s – it keeps your skills going. It’s – you know, you have to learn how to juggle again and it’s just a great thing. Plus, there’s a great payoff when it works. And I like to laugh almost more than anything in the world and it’s – if you can make somebody else laugh that’s a great thing. Theatre is like being shot out of a cannon. You have an adrenaline rush and once that’s over, you find yourself, at the end of the evening, spent. The actor’s high…it’s like falling in love. Almost out of body. The feeling of wanting to share everything with someone, in one case an audience, in the other case another human being. My guilty pleasure is acting. But you don’t get to do that every day. Well, I guess you do. Actually everybody acts every day, not just actors. I remember when I was working with Al Pacino and he’d talk about how acting was like playing when you were a kid, just losing yourself in something. I guess that’s some of it for me. I don’t know, I just find all of it — solving puzzles, putting it together, being part of a unit that’s making something — very gratifying. It’s an itch I can’t scratch anywhere else.”- #JohnGoodman