David Morse Quotes

My first summer at a repertory theater, I was making $20 a week. I was making a living, as far as I was concerned, and I was doing theater. And next season, I made $40 a week. But I don’t think anyone in my family would have considered that making a living.

‘Outsiders,’ I guess, is sort of dark, but I don’t really think of it as dark. The world up there on that mountain, it had the potential to have a lot of fun as well as a lot of drama, these guys raiding the town in their ATVs with their tattoos. It seemed like something different.

I’m acting for the pleasure of it.

Film is a very intimate medium.

At 17, I became a member of the Boston Repertory Theatre. I had an opportunity pretty quickly and performed with the theater for six years.

To this day, that’s what I love the most: finding and playing characters who are out of my experience.

I was getting to the point where I said to my wife, ‘I don’t think I’ll ever be in New York in a play again.’

I try to do things I haven’t been able to before.

I was a teenager and it was tough years for me. Being able to bring myself into a character and live in somebody else’s world was so important for me emotionally. I couldn’t express things well in my normal life. I was so overwhelmed by my emotions.

I’m not sure I always feel like I’m in the seat. Sometimes I’m only holding on by one hand and flying out behind the roller coaster. I don’t know anybody who doesn’t feel that way.

With Sean Penn, he wants to be surprised. He doesn’t necessarily want what he’s written, although we’ll do what he’s written. He likes the danger of acting.

Because I’d only done theater, that’s really what I thought most of my life would be. I always figured that movies would be a part of it at some point. I didn’t know how or when.

In independent film you tend to have stories that involve more of a community, and the smaller characters are important to the story.

Home wasn’t a pleasant place to live, growing up.

Just in terms of when I got the script, the character I probably liked the least was Big Foster. Because even though he was central to the story and to that world, he was really written to be kind of a brute, a pig, a completely black-and-white bad guy.

I was involved with some great things in television that I could never have done in film.

I had almost no money, but with the little bit I had, I got a ticket to see ‘That Championship Season’ at the Booth theater.

I’ve had the chance to work with Christopher Plummer, one of the great stage and film actors, a couple of times, including on ‘Prototype,’ the first TV movie I ever did. It was science fiction in the Ray Bradbury sense, written by the famous team who created Columbo, Levinson, and Link.

By the time I could have played football, I was already into acting and that’s what I wanted to do.

I don’t even know what TV star means. I know there’s a difference in how people approach you, compared to movies. They feel OK coming up to you and sitting with you in a restaurant, unfortunately.

With repertory, you had to play all these different characters. The range of roles is really what I fell in love with, every night getting to become somebody different. That was my idea of acting, getting to be part of the company and a family.

I have a DVD player and I have DVDs, and I have no time to watch any of them.

I don’t like talking about myself. I’m not really interested in myself. One of the good things about being a supporting actor is that you get to talk about other people.

I want to talk about my very first play, when I was in eighth grade. One day, my English teacher, Mrs. Baker, announced that we were going to read ‘On Borrowed Time’ out loud in class. I was a mediocre student; I was terrified that she was going to call on me, so I hid my head.

There’s been one movie star that would not work with me because of my height. I had so many people who had to stand on boxes when they do scenes with me.