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Ron Davis / Shooting Star Photo Agency |
ON ACTING:
I've never sat back and said, 'That was good.' I'm always curled up. I only see the mistakes and the stuff I could have done better. I don't know many actors who sit back and watch themselves and pat themselves on the back.
TV Guide Online 3/18/00When I saw Brad Dourif in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, I was so affected by his performance and identified so heavily with that character - the stutterer - I said, "I want to do that."
New Jersey Post Ledger 5/25/96I worked in the theatre for 10 years and I was destitute even though I was working a lot!
Sidewalks Entertainment 9/5/95You always hope [for fame], but if I had those expectations I'd just be dashed. I don't believe, until I'm working, that it's going to happen. If I'm talking to somebody about a script and an offer has been made and a deal has been struck, until I'm actually working I keep my mouth shut.
TV Guide Online 3/18/00It depends on how tired you are. Sometimes you're so tired that you must totally rely on technique, but most of the time you have to go through it to some degree, otherwise it's not fun for me as an actor. That's one of the reasons I act in the first place: it's so interesting to put yourself in those positions and feel them, instead of faking them.
Starlog Science Fiction Explorer 2/96Keeping up the emotion of the role and waiting until 5 a.m. to do your closeups is part of the gig. Any actor who's not working would say, "Hey, lemme get in there."
Portland Oregonian 8/15/95Some days I think I'm pretty versatile, other days I think I'm a one-trick pony.
National Post 2/12/04I generally go to work excited...maybe 'cause its early and I've got a double cappuccino in me, but still, I'm going to work excited!
E! News Daily 1/10/96No, I'm a monkey still and I can screech and swing as much as I like but basically -- they'll just give me a banana and tell me to shut up.
UPN 9 News 2/5/96That's the actor's lot. You go in, do your best, and the door swings on your butt on the way out.
USA Today 2/5/96Every time a show ends, you're saying, "Oh man, where did the money go? I'm broke, and here I am getting doors slamed in my face all over again."
Portland Oregonian 8/15/95What.... do you think I have control? Are you kidding? You think Tom Veil is a pawn, try being an actor...
Prodigy Chat 5/10/96Sometimes you drop into a group that just feels really good. Sometimes something takes over. For me, acting is a hit-and-miss situation. I'm happy about 20 percent of the time.
New Jersey Star Ledger 5/25/96I'm hungrier now than I was then. I want to do something great. Then, I just wanted to do something. Now I want to do something GOOD.
New Jersey Star Ledger 5/25/96In university, I was taking all kinds of stuff because I didn't really know what I wanted to do and I needed - there was quite a heavy course load because there was physics and economics and I needed three easy credits and I realized that acting was completely subjective. You can't be failed. So, I thought I'll just do that. I'll get the three easy credits.... it sort of appealed to all the things that I like, which is the language and music.
Canada A.M. 2/2/04My advice would be don't follow behind me, man. Make your own decisions......I would say don't take the short line and just try and work. Really think about what your strengths are and what you really want to do and hold out and do the stuff you think you're really great at..........Stuff that really interests you. That draws you. I think I've made all kinds of choices that if I were to do it again, I'd do differently.
Toronto Star 2/13/04I've never really thought of any role as a 'launching pad.' I'm too superstitious to say that a job is my big break before I've even done the work.
Entertainment Weekly 7/24/98
Question: What's the biggest challenge to acting in a series like Nowhere Man?
Answer: Not repeating myself emotionally, not playing different scenes with similar beats I've used in episodes prior.
Prodigy Chat 5/10/96Question: How did you get picked for Nowhere Man?
Answer: I think like most other actors in Los Angeles are picked. I went in and auditioned and sat by the phone....... And this time - miracle of miracles - it rang!
Sidewalks Entertainment 9/5/96Question: Do you have any career advice for young actors?
Answer: Don't let getting turned down disappoint you because it happens all the time. It doesn't matter what level you're at. The door's always going bang! bang! bang! and eventually [squeak!] it'll open and you can get in. But just don't quit if you really want it.
Sidewalks Entertainment 9/5/95I don't know if I see actors as influences but there are many I respect a great deal and aspire to be as good as and if I work hard enough maybe I'll approach that: Ron Rifkin... dozens of wonderful ones and sometimes you just see a scene as you're channel surfing and that will re-inspire me to work harder...
Prodigy Chat 5/10/96There are things I get consumed with on every character. Once I'm involved with that character, you could ask me then -- and then I'd have to say, "that's my favorite one."
CompuServe Conference 6/20/96
ON FAME:
I learned the train only stops for a very brief time. You stick your head out the window and get recognized by the crowd. Then the train pulls out of the station.
San Jose Mercury News 4/26/90It comes and goes like a supersonic jet. You hear it coming. It sounds incredible. About the minute it's really loud, it's gone.
TV Guide 11/4/95I'd be such a liar if I said "forget it".
Movieline 12/97ON PUBLICITY:
They're [publicists] so expensive. I've got too many other hobbies that require pissing money away.
Movieline 12/97I don't really see the value in it...I think work generates work more than publicity generates work.
Vancouver Sun 1/11/92I don't really like the idea of throwing money away to hype myself. I don't think it gets me more money or better roles.
Vancouver Sun TV Times 5/1/87ON HIS WEBPAGE:
It really threw me actually. That first of all there was that kind of specific interest and so much detail: my mothers maiden name and all. When I saw it first I sat there with my mouth open. It's disconcerting that there's that kind of information available. The person who put it together stopped short of putting any information there that could be vulnerable, but it reminded me of a little connection to my privacy... I feel like if people wanted more detail there would be nothing I could do to stop it... I suppose some small prideful part of me was excited by it.
Prodigy Chat 5/10/96You can look at my homepage and find out where I was born and who the delivering doctor was!
Prodigy Chat 5/10/96I really appreciated being part of this conference and look forward to maybe doing it again. And does the group care if I logged into the homepage and kept you posted on what I'm doing?
CompuServe Conference 6/20/96ON WORKING STEADILY:
I want to take a break. I want to play my guitar. I haven't really been home for the past eight months.
Toronto Star 2/13/04It's like I rarely get to sleep at home - I'm barely exaggerating.
Toronto Star 7/22/97It's unnerving me a bit, to have all this stuff on my plate at once. But it's always feast or famine, and this happens to be, well, lots of stuff on the table.
Vancouver Sun 1/11/92It's really weird the way it's backed up. I guess it'll burst onto the scene sometime this year all at once and it'll seem that I'm everywhere and then suddenly I'll disappear again.
Boston Herald 5/7/94The only thing I need is some spare time to take a cooking course and some music courses!
Boston Herald 5/7/94I don't even know what's going on in the world! I don't even have time to read the papers!
E! News Daily 1/10/96My fears are of being so embroiled in doing my job and making sure that it's as good as I can make it, that I spend 24 hours a day thinking about it and the other part of my life - -which is how I relax and read and play guitar and my relationship with my wife and all those things -- falls by the wayside. I'm concerned that I'm going to be completely sucked into this intoxicating business of trying to make a good show, of trying to tell a good story.
Starlog Science Fiction Explorer 2/96I have no spare time. I have literally NO spare time. But if I DID, I'd be playing guitar and noodling around on the piano.
Sidewalks Entertainment 9/5/95I discovered through the year that I can operate well on about 6 hours sleep, which is half of what I like. Now I just leap out of bed and pursue my own life... which is a nice change. It geared me up to work on a high energy level and turned out to be a good thing in my life... I'm relaxing with a vengeance.
Prodigy Chat 5/10/96I really don't have a home, actually, just travel and work all the time. Home is a hotel.
Vancouver Province 2/11/04ON HOLLYWOOD:
That's where the business is, but that's not where I work.
Calgary Sun 2/16/04Y'know it's weird. Sometimes it appears that town is so full of money, it's sticking to my shoes. You walk down the street and it's blowing all around you. It's hard to remind yourself that a weird zephyr could come around, some chinook, and blow all the money away.
(Toronto) Sunday Sun Television Magazine 7/5/87It was tough -- a lot of political positioning and I'm not very good at it.
CompuServe Conference 6/20/96They [producers of his first series Legmen] put me up in the Hyatt on Sunset [Boulevard]. I remember looking out a window and thinking, 'Who am I kidding? Millions of lights, millions of people; what makes me think for an instant that I could crack a job here? Then I got a job and I thought it was easy because it took only a week. Then it took me another year to figure out it wasn't so easy.
New Jersey Post Ledger 5/25/96Everything for me can eventually be explained -- except, that is, the behavior of studio executives.
Canadian TV Guide 11/25/95ON INDEPENDENT FILMMAKING:
It always seems that in big-budget films, the scripts are created by committee. Little films have one guy at the helm, one vision. They are ultimately more interesting.
Smoke 2/96It's the dream of every TV actor I know.
Starlog Science Fiction Explorer 2/96You can't have as many takes as you'd like, and you have to get stuff quickly, make sure you get the master (the main shot) before lunch or complete a whole sequence before lunch or otherwise you won't make the day, and the movie will only be 20 minutes long. It puts pressure on you, but in other ways it frees you because you realize going in that it's not going to be perfect. So you just go, 'You know what, let's dive in here and not waste any time talking. Let's just do it.' And sometimes that'll give you good stuff, you know.
Ottawa Citizen 2/3/04They're really apples and oranges, you know. They're such different beasts. The Sweet Hereafter was much more intimate and came together quickly on any given day because you didn't have the luxury of time as much, although Atom somehow manages to never make you feel hurried.
Vancouver Province 9/27/99ON FEATURE FILMS:
The thing about feature films is you can develop scripts for a long, long time, and then, while you're shooting them, you have the luxury of time to really explore scenes in different ways. You're not stuck with [TV network censors] who might be at odds with interesting choices that you might want to make, because those choices are not politically correct or they run counter to your advertisers' mindsets.
Vancouver Sun 12/16/97ON TELEVISION (from the outside):
I do own a television set but it's inoperable......
The Wil Shriner Show 5/22/88Even before television was a recognized evil, my parents were fully in tune to its heinous nature!
New Jersey Post Ledger 5/25/96I wasn't allowed to watch television as a child. My parents just felt it wasn't good for us. And without a doubt they were right.
Starlog Science Fiction Explorer 2/96We were rationed....half an hour a day, but we could save half hours, so I'd save 2 1/2 hours for Saturday, so I could watch 2 hours of Wide World of Sports and 1/2 hour of something mindless.
The Wil Shriner Show 5/22/88ON TELEVISION (from the inside):
When you're in the inside, you can see more clearly how the network and the studio work together and don't work together, and the problems that can happen. It's just amazing to me that anything gets on the air at all. It's just unbelievable! The fact that you can produce a show that is even marginally watchable, I think, is a miracle. There are just so many people who think their opinion is the one that should count.
Vancouver Sun 12/16/97TV is a factory and to create a product of quality with the time constraints and budget restirctions is very tricky and not always possible.
Prodigy Chat 5/10/96And there's all this stuff with the show [Nowhere Man]. Is it gonna change? Are we gonna get picked up? All this stuff that's constantly hurled at us by people way above me. This show is going through what Veil is going through on a daily basis in the politics of making television.
NDV 12/1/95
[Television] is a tough medium to be tough in, to really shake people up in, because you're bound by the restrictions that advertisers place a lot of times on content. Granted, that changes by the hour, but it's something that you're always fighting against.
Vancouver Sun 12/16/97The thing with series TV is that regardless of how well the pilot is written and how wonderful the intentions of the writers and producers are, the product that you end up putting out week to week often suffers because of the schedule. It's called feeding the monster -- they have to generate a new script every week, and oftentimes logic falls through the cracks. Then characters change, and writers and producers come and go, and networks change their feelings about what the strengths of the show might or might not be. The end result? The pilot might be a thoroughbred, but the series could easily turn out to be a camel.
Entertainment Weekly Online 7/24/98on leaving series television:
I told my agent, "I'm not going to do a television series this year, so don't bug me about them. I'm completely spineless and I will roll over if I get an offer. So don't call me about it."
Georgia Strait 4/6/00ON THE 1994 GENIE AWARDS:
I think the most salient thing for me was that...it made me feel that finally I am a part of a community to which I thought I never belonged.
Toronto Globe and Mail 12/9/94ON HIS SELF-IMAGE:
People I grew up with would say I wasn't an introvert, but inside, I was.
New Jersey Post Ledger 5/25/96I was Charlie Brown [as a child] ...ever since I was this big, my head was so big it cast a shadow over my whole body.....I was a strange child....
The Wil Shriner Show 5/22/88As a melancholic, intermittently suicidal teenager, I identified strongly with [Billy Bobbit in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest].
Smoke 2/96I was terrified by the monkeys in Wizard of Oz. [I'd] hide behind the couch until they were gone, so I never really developed a deep hunger for sitting in front of the screen and pissing myself. I've never been a big fan of suspense. I just get way to locked up in it and I end up feeling way too uncomfortable.
NBC video interview 11/97I'm a happier soul than anyone would guess from watching the raft of defeat and agony in various roles,
Ottawa Citizen 2/3/04I'm a sunny person. I'm happy to wake up in the morning. I have a brooding, black, miserable bent, but I thwart that by taking deep breaths and looking at the sky.
NDV 12/1/95I have to take my shirt off in two weeks so I have to do situps, toneup my boney self....I should be hanging in the garage between a rake and a hoe.
Toronto Star 12/9/95If I have control, I feel my destiny is my own; without control I'm too unnerved and angry to believe in it at all.
Smoke 2/96I'm a pretty moody guy. I generally wake up happy to be alive. I'm glad the day has come and I'm glad to get up and I'm in a good mood. But I'm also pretty moody, and I think acting is a great outlet for me to just go and snarl and weep and yell and whine and cajole at the office. That gets rid of all that stuff, so my life isn't consumed by this sort of raging.
Starlog Science Fiction Explorer 2/96
I think I might go mad. I'm a bit more of a reactionary than [Thomas Veil] is. I mean, more knee-jerk reactionary than he is. Yeah, I might have crawled into the belltower a bit sooner....
Prodigy Chat 5/10/96ON HIS CASTING:
It's so weird, because I'm so not that guy...I put on a suit and I really have to go, `Let it happen, man, let it happen.' Because I'm never out of my tennis shoes.
Toronto Star 2/13/04I'm just trying to do stuff that at least mixes it up 50-50 between creepy bad guys and less creepy good guys.
Ottawa Citizen 2/3/04I think part of it was that I was stuck in television for so long and when I finally decided to try and do movies exclusively, I happened to get something high profile where I was a nefarious bastard [Double Jeopardy]. And so I came to people's consciousness in that way. And right around that time was The Sweet Hereafter ... and there wasn't a lot of joy coursing through the veins of that character
Ottawa Citizen 2/3//04The bad guys are held to be more interesting, but recently I've been playing good guys with their share of problems and that has turned out to be pretty interesting too.
Yahoo's NBC All-Star Chat 7/19/97Before [Exotica], I think I was probably seen as some middle-of-the-road television guy who just did movies-of-the-week. I don't think people thought I could actually do this.
Toronto Globe and Mail 12/9/94In the States, I do movies-of-the-week where I play the guy who looks okay at first, then turns out to be the murderer, or runs away with the wife or steals your money....I get offers to do weird stuff, more weird than interesting.
Toronto Star 12/9/94What do you mean, you don't like murderous back-stabbing psychopaths? It's been my stock in trade for a decade.
CompuServe Conference 6/20/96I know I usually turn bad at the end of the movie. I look like a nice guy, then I end up ripping somebody's head off.
Metro Cafe 1/94Question: Hollywood is suddently noticing you're around
Answer: You mean Hollywood is suddenly noticing I'm around 40
Toronto Sun 9/28/99I've played my share of baddies, but that may change with this [playing JFK in Thirteen Days. I'm hoping I'll look different enough as Kennedy (that) they won't think `Double Jeopardy' or William Sokal. It's so new to me, thinking in terms of image. I don't give it much thought.
Boston Herald 4/2/00ON DREAMS:
Question: Bruce, do you believe that dreams really can be interpreted to mean something?
Answer: Absolutely. There's a long tradition of great minds that believe exactly that. Speak to Dr. Freud or Mr. Jung.
Yahoo's NBC All-Star Chat 7/19/97Question: What was the last dream you had about?
Answer: You may find this hard to believe, but a plane that I was flying in turned into a pita bread shell and fell from the sky. Glad you asked.
Yahoo's NBC All-Star Chat 7/19/97ON SKIING:
Once you get proficient, skiing is a real form of expression. From the rhythm comes the expression.
Skiing Magazine 1/88
I blew my knee out early on and I had to find something else to do because you can't really be a professional skier with one leg and make any money.
Sidewalks Entertainment 9/5/95All I wanted to be was a ski racer, but my one knee is meat. I blew my knee at age 15.
Toronto Star 12/9/94Question: I read that you once wanted to be a professional skier. What inspired you and what changed your mind?
Answer: Well, it is absolutely true and my father motivated me a lot by exposing me to skiing at an early age and I'm a competitive sort of person, but I was stopped by an injury in the days before arthroscopy.
Prodigy Chat 5/10/96ON CANADA AND BEING CANADIAN:
I left Vancouver like 13 years ago and now this [Los Angeles] is my home. It's where my friends are, my wife, our house. But I seem to work constantly in Canada these days.
Toronto Star 7/22/97...my wife had always been talking about moving back to Vancouver. But the rain up there has changed her mind.
Toronto Star 7/22/97I'm very tied to Canada. I go back to B.C. and Toronto all the time. I'd love to live there but I still have to knock on doors to get jobs and the doors are down here. Canadian Citizenship keeps me in touch with a sense of my past and my heritage and it's safer for me to travel worldwide with a Canadian Passport.
CompuServe Conference 6/20/96Question: [As a Canadian] can you vote and who would you vote for?
Answer: No, I can only be drafted! I would vote for the best man for the job!
Prodigy Chat 5/10/96ON HIS (IN)FAMOUS INFLATABLE HAT SCHEME:
I had designed an inflatable hat shaped like the stadium that I was going to sell to the Grey Cup fans over the weekend. When you blew into a tube, the hat's crown would expand to look like the Teflon dome at B.C. Place and a whistle would go, whee-whee-whee! Unfortunately, when 1,000 of the units arrived from Taiwan a few days before the game, I found that they didn't inflate and the whistle sounded more like thump-thump- thump!
Toronto Star 2/11/84Hey! Just because I invented and tried to market an inflatable hat doesn't mean I've been destitute for that long....Yeah, a friend and I were sitting around one afternoon dreaming up schemes to make money and we'd never made more than about $5,000 a year in our lives and we came up with the idea for an....inflatable hat....
Question: Why would one want an inflatable hat?
Answer: Well, we found out later that one wouldn't.....
Stephanie Miller Show 11/15/95My friend Norm Foote and I hit on a scheme we were sure would make Joe Public fall over and hand us his wallet....It seemed at the time like we were addressing a gaping hole in B.C. culture...The blow-up part only inflated the hat to half-mast and the whistle sort of went, "Phhhhhhfttttt."
Canadian TV Guide 5/21/88Twice a year, Norm says he's gonna throw those hats away, but I won't let him
TV Guide 11/4/95