Jeffrey Tambor
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.Collection: Inspirational
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.
I went bald when I was 18. My father cried. He cried about many things. But it allowed me to play older men in summer stock.
You know that thing where you're trying to do the crossword puzzle, and you're trying to fit the word that's in your head in the puzzle, and then you go 'Ugh!' and you walk away, and then it comes to you. I'm interested in that moment. The release of expectation, and the release of pleasing yourself and pleasing anybody. Breaking the mindset.
George Saunders's 'Lincoln in the Bardo' is a hands-down masterpiece - the subject of Abraham Lincoln and the genius of this author is a perfect union.
'Attaboys' help people. I am huge on attaboy. Confidence is the great ingredient to living and art, with fidelity to self. It's so important to surround yourself with people who give you confidence.
I was a young actor who was bald, but at that time, there was a thing on television that - there was a prototype or a stereotype of a principal who was bald and mean with glasses, or there was... the angry boss who was bald.
That's just me and my own body issues - I think I'm fat and bald and old and ugly.
Some people have a mandate that you can't change.
I lost my moorings. But you know the great thing about acting? It's all part of the gig. You get to put it in your work.
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.
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.
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.
I remember going to Bob Preston's dressing room because I was losing a laugh - as you do in a long run. He said, 'Give me the script. That's where you're going off the road.' That's comedy. It's never the line itself; it's in the foundation.
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.
My education was doing good plays and also stinkers. When you do a stinker, you learn how to act. I like having to audition. It's nice to do rehearsals. But it's with an audience that you get to love it!
I came to New York late; I was already past 30.
When I was a young boy in San Francisco, I remember being sent home from playing with a friend, and I remember the mother saying, 'Tell Jeffrey to go home.' And I said to the girl, 'Why?' She goes, 'My mother says that you're the people who killed Christ.'
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 can only speak for me... but in my life, I find that, in sobriety, I feel much more, and I have much more depth. I also feel - not to segue, but as being a parent of five kids, I can bring much more to my acting, and so I'm all about anything that gives you more feeling and more depth.
I thought I was gonna do Lear, but I'm gonna do Maura.
I would not be unhappy were I the last cisgender male to play a female transgender on television.
I think I have femininity, I have masculinity, but I get to use all of Jeffrey, and that's very powerful. And this is what I always thought when I went down in my little basement in San Francisco, where I grew up, and daydreamed about being an actor: It felt like this. This is what it felt like.
I did not know that you had to learn makeup. I just thought you went, 'Oh, I'm gonna put on some makeup.'
You want to feel, 'I know that character.'
I kind of like not knowing how to do something - it's more exciting.
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 just put your head down and do the work.
I grew up in San Fransisco in a very liberal community. My environment was very, very open and very liberal.
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.
There's a wonderful adage in acting that you're stuck with the character, but the character is also stuck with you.
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.
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.
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.
We did a thing that we would call we call 'hirstories.' H - I - R - S - T - O - R - Y. I would enact a young Mort. And that always felt - it was so funny - it felt more difficult than playing Maura.
I really got used to playing Maura.
We have been treated gorgeously by Amazon.
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.
Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is part of our constitutional rights and it belongs to everybody.
'Clocked' means someone sees you for being transgender.
I don't take off my nail polish when I go home because I'm too lazy, and they're fine with it. Maybe the checkout at the grocery store's not so great with it, but they're fine with it. The distrust, the phobias, those are learned, those are taught. But the natural grace is to understand and to love.
I learned the biggest lesson just watching Ed McMahon, watching him watch Mr. Carson's monologue.
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.
It was the '50s, and the card catalog and the Dewey Decimal System were in fashion. I hung out in the 812 section - American theater and plays. This is where I first read Arthur Miller's 'Death of a Salesman' and was transfixed. I remember staring into space for what seemed an eternity after reading Linda Loman's final speech.
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've done 'Yo Gabba Gabba!' I've done... oh, it's not called 'Rapunzel' anymore. 'Tangled', that's it. Those are both huge.
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'.