“When you're performing, you're playing to the back row. With acting, you have to be more nuanced.”
“You can be the lead in a movie just for the sake of being a lead in a movie, or you can just be in a good movie.”
“A lot of times I think people, when they're doing a movie that's a family movie, they're worried about this being too esoteric or too dark or too weird.”
“I don't think I could do what Woody Allen or Clint Eastwood or Ben Stiller do, where they direct a movie and they star in it. I would just be like, 'Oh, I don't even want to look at my face.'”
“I moved out to L.A. to be a filmmaker or director. I didn't even think about doing comedy or even acting. I wanted to be like Paul Thomas Anderson or Wes Anderson, but I wasn't going to a lot of comedy.”
“I took Second City out of desperation, and that's what ended up working out. It shows that you should be doing a lot of different stuff, taking whatever opportunities are there, to see what works.”
“I was always self-conscious about the fact that I didn't have as much comedy experience as other people at 'SNL,' and I kept thinking they were going to realize they'd made a mistake by hiring me.”
“I'm crazy lucky. I was trying to be a filmmaker. I was doing Second City classes as a way to be creative. I was a PA for a long time. I was working as an assistant editor on 'Iron Chef America' when I got 'SNL.' It was one of those situations where you're concentrating in one thing and the peripheral thing popped.”
“If a movie doesn't even have financing yet, they'll do a table read for it at a casting director's office with actors, for the producer and the writer, just to hear if the movie is working.”
“To be totally honest? I don't know if I'll keep doing more impressions. People told me I had a facility for it, and I was like, 'Okay, I'm the impression guy.' So you imagine the cast at 'SNL' is an A-Team, and you've got the explosives guy, and I'm the impression guy.”