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Accept discomfort
I’m primarily known, of course, as an actor, and when I was younger, I liked performing, but I hated being scrutinized. I’m still exactly that way. My happiest times are while I’m acting or writing something, and my most anxiety-producing moments are showing it to people. And so when I think about the things that motivate me, they’re not all beautiful, creative inspirations of joy that I want to impart my wonderful, creative jokes and thoughts and sadnesses to the world. A lot of times, I am going to fail in a public way, and that is worse than failing in any private way.
When I talk to other people, especially successful people, people who are busy, people who are working in echelons of their industries, they feel the same way. I wrote a play when I was younger, and I wound up getting the script to this actress, Vanessa Redgrave, who’s like the greatest actress in the English-speaking language, and she wanted to do the play. So she and I did the play for months in a, you know, 180-seat theater in New York City. And this woman, Vanessa Redgrave, who has achieved what any other actor would dream of achieving, she came to the theater every day at four o’clock for an eight o’clock show, sat backstage with her rotisserie chicken, went over her lines with shaking hands. And this is a woman who has achieved everything on Broadway, West End, film, everything, and she is sitting backstage every night in a panic that tonight would not go well.
And it just occurred to me that this is kind of what, like, great people are motivated by. They’re amazing at their job. They’re creative. They think outside the box, but they’re also worried that the next time is not going to go well. And that’s how I’ve always felt. Even when I was doing, like, children’s theater, I was like, “The Saturday night show was good, but the tomorrow night show, my uncle is coming to, and if my uncle doesn’t like it, I’m not going to be able to go to Thanksgiving.” This the thoughts, the crazy thoughts, that I had when I was nine years old, and I still have those thoughts now, but it’s about critics coming or you know, colleagues coming or whatever to my plays. And Vanessa Redgrave has those too at 77 years old. And so it kind of just taught me that, like, this is just the nature of, like, being really good at something, trying really hard at something, is that you still feel, like, the incredible discomfort of worrying about the next time. And I assume this applies to every industry.
Create your own bubble
The inclinations that I have towards self-doubt, towards self-criticism, towards internalizing kind of others’ disappointments in me, you know, what I have created was essentially kind of a bubble that allows me to work at my best. And so I surround myself with people who do different things. I really don’t like to talk about the industry that I’m in because I find, in some ways, you can never turn it off. My wife works in social service and in education in New York, and it’s such a relief to come home after a day of editing a movie and feeling like maybe it’s not that good, and hearing the wonderful work that she did during the day that I feel, you know, as somebody not in that field is, like, so much more interesting, you know, than the work I do. It sounds strange, but I don’t watch the movies I’ve been in. I don’t read any reviews of movies that I’m in. I am most effective by not thinking about that stuff, by not becoming obsessed with something that I can’t control so I can kind of focus on the work that I’m doing. And a lot of that has to do with just the kind of things that I’ve chosen to be surrounded by.