Judd Nelson
I got to play Santa, too. It's really important to play Santa, you know.Collection: Play
Alien's a great one. That's a scary movie.Collection: Scary
Part of the reason I thought that I might do a series is, my dad has pretty much been on the same road to work for years and years. And it's like, "Could I do something like that? Am I so independent that I can't punch the clock at the same place?" So part of it was a kind of exercise. "Can I be responsible in this way?" And lo and behold, I could. Luckily. It'd be bad if I couldn't.Collection: Dad
If you read a script enough, especially a good script - I try to read it 40 to 50 times before you begin so you get a sense of the arc: what happens before, what happens after, what happens during.Collection: Trying
In a good script, it's really like a treasure map. You just focus on that, all the answers are pretty much in it.Collection: Focus
I got offered to do Ben 10. Sue Blu was the [voice] director of that, and I had worked with her - I think she was on Transformers as well. And she was so great.Collection: Thinking
Ice-T was just a pleasure to work with. He was a smart gentleman.Collection: Smart
There were a few things that, in rehearsal, any one of us might try. [John] Hughes would go, "I like that," to me spitting up in the air and catching it in my mouth. It was just something I did in a rehearsal and Molly [ Ringwald] went, "Ewww." And John went, "Can you do that again?" And I went all day long, and he was like, "Okay, let's do that."Collection: Air
My closest friend is canine. I have precious few close friends, and most of them are not actorsCollection: Actors
I think that there's room for everyone. I don't think that if one person succeeds then another must fail. That's lunacy. I'm not sure what the reasons are for my philosophy, maybe it's the fact that if there are ten people doing the same job, we all know how we feel and what our high points and low points are.Collection: Jobs
You know who was wonderful to work with? Was Paul Gleason, may he rest in peace.Collection: Rest In Peace
As a kid, I had a crush on Sophia Loren and Raquel Welch.Collection: Crush
The Dark Backward. Bill Paxton is in it with me. Wayne Newton. James Caan. Adam Rifkin wrote and directed it. It was made a number of years ago and very odd. Not for the squeamish.Collection: Dark
I went to acting school in New York City for two years. I studied with Stella AdlerCollection: New York
Kim Coates is really funny. He's a blast. If you have to get beaten up and tortured, he's a good guy to get tortured by.Collection: Guy
Voice-over stuff is so much fun because you don't have hair and makeup and wardrobe. You get to show up. And there were some talented people, and we don't even know them. And they're so gifted. They can do all these accents and voices. It's really fun to do that stuff. It's really like actor camp.Collection: Fun
I worked with the late Leonard Frey. I did a play, and I would have these ideas and he would say, "I don't know. Try it." And I would try it and it would be awful, and he would go, "What do you think?" And I would go, "It was awful." And he goes, "Okay, we'll try something else." And that's great because it really makes you feel less working-for and more working-with. There's nothing better than to feel a part of the team.Collection: Team
Trace Adkins doesn't talk too much, but when he does he's got great stories. He's lived a great life.Collection: Doe
I was trained by Stella Adler for theater so you kind of give it all on every take.Collection: Giving
[Kevin] Costner said, "You don't have to do that... this is a wide shot, so you can calm down."Collection: Kevin
You just have to learn certain technical things, like where the camera is, not to block people's light in your own, to hit your marks, and that you do it kind of piecemeal.Collection: Block
It's strange, 'cause a play, you start at the beginning and you go all the way through to the end. So it's naturally very well rehearsed and you get a rhythm and a flow. In film, you can shoot the ending before the beginning. It's very odd. And it's like a craft you have to learn.Collection: Play
Breakfast Club was great because we had a real rehearsal, and we shot primarily in sequence.Collection: Real
Breakfast Club was great because we had a real rehearsal, and we shot primarily in sequence. I thought that was going to be how movies were done. I didn't really know how lucky we all were. We had a director that liked actors. I didn't know that was going to be rare.Collection: Real
[John] Hughes is a great loss, I think. He was the first filmmaker that could look at someone who was young without seeing them as being less.Collection: Loss
[John] Hughes was well aware that to ignore the seriousness of young people is to encourage things like Columbine, so you might want to listen. And we were all pretty serious, a little bit, in high school. Some a little more than others.Collection: School
[John] Hughes really wanted it to sound authentic. He was a real collaborator. He encouraged us to bring to the material things we thought were maybe more truthful.Collection: Real
I remember Emilio [Estevez] and I were at John's house during the rehearsal process. And John [Huges] had mentioned he wrote the first draft of Breakfast Club in a weekend. And we both at the same time went, "First draft? How many do you have?" And John said he's got four other drafts. And we go, "Can we read them?" And for the next three hours, Emilio and I read those other four drafts.Collection: Weekend
As they were building that library in that school's gym [in the Breakfast Club], they built a rehearsal space for us. It was really an empty room taped out with the same dimensions of the library. And they had the tables all there. And he had us sitting at the same table. All of us.Collection: School
[John] Hughes was open to that [rehearsal]. This can only happen if the director and/or the writer are open to that.Collection: Directors
Stagecoach is really my first Western, actually.Collection: Firsts
Trace Adkins is such a great guy. Really is. And he's got that incredible voice - low, deep. He throws words around like "my dental coverage."Collection: Voice
I like Chicago. It's a great city. It's always fun to revisit it.Collection: Fun
I wanted to meet Orson Welles. So I was like, whatever, somehow get me in on this. I'm able to get cast in it, but Orson Welles worked alone. He worked before all of us worked. He didn't want to work with anyone else.Collection: Want
I play a garbage man who moonlights as a stand-up comedian. Terrible.Collection: Men
[In The Dark Backward ] someone who has writer's block and kills people in A Cabin By The Lake. I guess he's a type of serial killer, but I don't know.Collection: Block
I wasn't Santa in Santa Jr., but I was Santa in Cancel Christmas.Collection: Santa
Santa Jr. I was a cop. Yes, I was officially Santa. But a younger Santa. He goes young, clean-shaven, to how we imagine Santa with all the white hair and beard and "Ho ho ho." Kind of funny.Collection: Hair
It's a profession where merit is not necessarily rewarded.Collection: Merit
You can do crap work in a big movie, and it does good things. You can do great work in a movie no one sees, it does nothing. That's the way it goes.Collection: Doe
You have to kind of roll with the punches. That's why I think work begets work to a certain degree. I just try and keep busy.Collection: Thinking
The first animation thing I did was the first Transformers, the one that was animated many years ago. And I had heard that Orson Welles was doing a voice on it.Collection: Years
I still think Brooke Shields is aces. She's really smart, interesting, doesn't feel that her time is more valuable than anyone else's. Really hardworking. And I knew that if she was the star of the show, it's going to be a good experience. And it was.Collection: Stars
I did a Moonlighting episode because I was friends with Whoopi [Goldberg, who guest-starred in the same episode], and she asked me to do it and I did it. But yeah, that was my first regular on a series, and it's because I'd met Brooke Shields a number of years earlier at a charity event.Collection: Years
Paul Gleason he was a great guy. I loved working with him.Collection: Guy
Paul Gleason played the teacher. I just tortured him as best I could. 'Cause he wasn't one of the kids, you know, so it was okay. He was great.Collection: Teacher
You get the sense that [John] Hughes is so right about the way groups divide and then divide again and then sometimes align and then sometimes break apart. And this idea that Michael Hall's character says, "On Monday, are we going to be friends?" you know, based on this.Collection: Monday
It's more like the inner workings of John Bender. He feels like he's been given a short shrift, he's not been provided the opportunities that maybe these other kids have. So he feels like he begins in a hole. And instead of trying to raise himself up, he wants to bring all of them down. That's a dynamic that's pretty universal. And so that was the real foothold on that. It wasn't like, "Oh, my high school experience is like John Bender's [in St. Elmo's Fire]."Collection: Real
I don't know if one's more typecasting than the other, or what I am more like. But I know that the high school I went to was a private school. It was prep school. It was a boarding school. So we didn't have a shop class. We didn't have Saturday detention. We went to school on Saturday. We did have Sunday study, which you very rarely get, because then you have 13 straight days of school. Who wants that?Collection: School