Actors From California

"Well, see, I’ve always viewed myself as a student. I would never say, “Oh, I’m a master.” I am a student. In that, I mean the idea is to keep learning and to keep looking and discovering. One of the things that really excites me, if you have that mindset, is working with younger actors."

"If I have my breakfast, then I can think, and that includes spiritual things, or whatever it is I want to do, meditate or read a book or watch a movie, and so I respect the food because that comes first for me. I think the movie shows the power of the experience that we all have with food."

"Well, all art is therapeutic and a positive place to transmute emotions from the negative into a positive."

"Karaoke is kind of like a prayer. You’re not supposed to videotape that. I’m not a professional singer. I’m just enjoying my life and blowing off some steam with friends."

"I think I’m going to continue, not so much to remind people or myself, but continue to play parts that allow me to express some meaning or some understanding of what it means to be a person."

"But let me say one thing: I am completely antidrug. I don’t do drugs. I don’t drink when I work. Sometimes in between movies I’ll have some drinks, but not always. I make so many characters, and I go so internal with them, that sometimes, when I’m not filming, wine or Champagne is like an eraser to a chalkboard. You can erase the character and make a clean slate so you can start making a new character. I hope that makes sense."

"My interest has always been cinema or films, because that’s what I was most compelled by. I was most inspired by the movie actors that I grew up with. I only hesitate to say I would because my process now is that I need about two months for the libretto of the screenplay to sink into my instruments so that I can not have to think about dialogue. That’s the first thing that’s going cave an actor in, having anxiety about not knowing their lines. I don’t want that."

"As a film actor, my job is to facilitate the director’s vision. If there’s something I’m doing that they don’t agree with, I drop it."

"I do love romantic movies, but at my age it doesn’t happen very often. I’ve always admired love stories—the expression of love is like white light to me. Every color of the universe is in the love story."

"There’s a difference between remorse and regret. I don’t have any regret. And when I say that, what I’m trying to say is that I’m applying my mistakes to my present so that I learned to improve on myself and be a better man. And I do think every movie I’ve made that hasn’t worked has all led me to this place where I’m at now, where I can do a movie like The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent and I can tell the story with some integrity and authenticity to it. Everything happened for a reason. I have to look at it like that because that’s the healthiest and most positive way of looking at it."

"I think this quarantine experience, and the fear of the pandemic itself, only augments the closeness we feel with our animal brothers and sisters. It’s interesting timing that this movie is coming out as we slowly begin to emerge from that experience. I was already close with my animals, but it only made us closer because I really needed their support during that time."

"I developed this mantra, which is: “I never had a career, I only have work.” And when I say that, I am saying that I’m a better man when I’m working because I don’t want to be that guy that’s sitting by a pool getting bombed on mai tais and Dom Perignon."

"Which is a word I don’t like anymore, ‘acting’. I sound like a pretentious fart for saying ‘thespian’ but acting now has become like lying. It sounds like I’m lying. If you’re a great actor, you’re a great liar. ‘Thespian’ seems more like it’s about finding some truth within and then projecting it for others to get it. At least, it does to me. But I’m not always on the same wavelength as everyone else."

"PLAYBOY: Your salary is shooting up into the multimillions per movie–reportedly $ 4 million to $ 7 million. Do those numbers make you chuckle? CAGE: I don't chuckle. I have respect for the dollar. PLAYBOY: It's a lot of money. CAGE: There's one thing I have some difficulty with, and that's hanging on to money. I find ways of spending money that mystify everybody around me. They're amazed. They want to know how I do it."

"The media sometimes talks about the Video-on-Demand work. The first thing I want to say about that is that, in my opinion, anyone that says “straight to video” in this age is a dinosaur. It’s past tense. Everything is streaming now. It’s one of the best ways to get your movie out there now and have it re-played. It’s been terrific for me."

"I’m not career-minded. My mantra has always been “work.” I never had a “career.” I only had “work.” That was a way of going through different movies. I find something in a movie that I think works. It’s like a rock album. Maybe not all of it works in the script, but there’s one or two songs, one or two scenes that work."

"I can’t go into specifics or percentages or ratios, but yeah, money is a factor. I’m going to be completely direct about that. There’s no reason not to be. There are times when it’s more of a factor than not. I still have to feel that, whether or not the movie around me entirely works, I’ll be able to deliver something and be fun to watch. But yes, it’s no secret that mistakes have been made in my past that I’ve had to try to correct. Financial mistakes happened with the real estate implosion that occurred, in which the lion’s share of everything I had earned was pretty much eradicated. But one thing I wasn’t going to do was file for bankruptcy. I had this pride thing where I wanted to work my way through anything, which was both good and bad."

"I wanted to create a kind of wild and artistic and bizarre image. I have changed in terms of what I want to express, and what I want my perception to be. But I personally think I’m very boring. I find myself perfectly content staying at home and playing with my cats or spending time with my boys, who are now older and into their own interests."

"…art is inherently political. Period. First thing someone does when they colonize, where they conquer or they take something over, the first thing that they do—top of their list—is destroy the art of the people. They must destroy their art, because that is their humanity. That is their liberation. That is the essence of them. That is the spirit of a people, of a culture, the art that they make. When someone is being conquered, when someone is being taken over, when something is being erased, that’s the first thing that goes..."

"I'm standing there and the verdict comes down. I say, 'How is that possible based off the evidence, based off the prosecution's evidence, let alone our evidence? How is that possible"

"There are no excuses, but by getting help, you begin to understand things about yourself"

"I'm really blessed. I'm surrounded by people who love me, who care about me. But this has been very, very, very hard, and very difficult, and confusing in many ways"

"From people who are supposed to look after you, in the absence of a father. I was f---ed up"

"And now we can all get busy and continue to connect and grow and learn from it, because it’s something that was in our family"

"I wish to God I knew. That would give clarity. That would give me some type of peace about it"

"I was attempting, and I did a terrible job at it apparently, I was attempting to motivate, to enlighten, to give perspective as in to what it is I was hoping to get out of the relationship"

"I'm an athlete. I'm a sportsman. I know my body. I know how it moves. I know my strength, or lack thereof, you know? None of that was employed on her"

"One of the things we deal with as a theme is legacy—thinking about the future of oneself, the future of one’s family, one’s culture. How they’re going to survive, and how their survival will be viewed by those in the future. In doing so, I had to really think about my past and the past of my people. I’m a member of the African diaspora, and what we have experienced, I had to tap into and use that…I quickly understood that me growing up in Texas, my grandparents living through Jim Crow America, my parents living through Jim Crow America, to a degree, my aunts and uncles; those are all very different experiences. There’s a difference in being raised somebody who’s gone through that and actually being a person who dealt with that...."

"From my experience, from my point of view, a young Black man in any situation with anyone honestly, if the authorities get involved in any way, there's going to be conversation, conflict, trauma"

"…Nerds come together, please, unite. Let’s all unite, it’s on. For me, that was very important, that Atticus is, and it’s coming to me now, a “yes and” character. Yes, he is that and he is this, and that’s the beautiful part about it. Yes, he’s this war hero. Yes, he can shoot a gun and run fast and take punches, but he also is a nerd. Those things are held at the same level. This man, this Black man, holds multitudes, and uses all of those things as a weapon. He weaponizes his mind. That is a beautiful thing and that was very important for me to let breathe and let live in the series."

"I'm a great man. A great man. I do great things for my culture and for the world. ... The woman that supports me needs to be a great woman"

"I'm gay in my art and straight in my life."

"[T]he story [...] was really more representative of how Sam thought than any picture except Ride the High Country. He liked to laugh at things, if no one was around to catch him at it."

"The Losers was a funny show. We had and locked up for a series with it until Tom McDermott wouldn't pay Lee's price. Well, after the show continued to draw a large segment of the audience around the sixth time out, McDermott called Lee and raised the ante to something like a million dollars and Lee told him to go stick it up his ass! I've always liked Lee for that--it cost me a lot of money at the time but I would've done the same thing in Lee's place."

"I said to him, "Well, I'm just trying to find out who Hildy is, and it was out in the open, in the western street, and he yelled at me, "She's you!" You know? Like, in such a way as to say, "You're the whore," you know? He was not very nice. And he did that to men to rile them, too. There have been many men who have done things to get even with Sam, because he had no tact."

"I walked from the series because Jules Levy and that group had taken over my initial concept and perverted it into pap. They wouldn't let Johnny grow up; they refused to let it be the story of a boy who grows to manhood learning what it's all about."

"I did this one script for ' that turned down--said it was a piece of shit! I knew it was one of the best things I'd written, so I took it back and reworked it and at Four Star bought it as a pilot for '. Dick Powell was really a fine gentleman and the eagle behind Four Star's success; he helped me a great deal. I didn't direct the first Rifleman; did that. I just wrote it. I did direct four of them before I left, however. The first one I directed I also wrote, called "The Marshal." It was the episode that brought in as the reformed drunk who became the marshal--a part he played for five years."

"Sam and I work well together. I would go to and from work with him, so we would have that extra time to talk with each other—that kind of thing is very unusual, but I think something comes of that proximity."

"It would've been nicer if he didn't pose as he did, and sit behind sunglasses that have mirrors on them so that no one could see his eyes. Because he was such a liar, he was afraid to get caught, because if you look in someone's eyes deeply enough, you can tell they're lying. So he was afraid of that; he wouldn't let anyone see his eyes."

"We've all grown up with the idea that gunning a man down is just fun and games. All of us, as kids, played cops and robbers, with toy pistols or pointing a finger at somebody and saying, "Bang, Bang. You're dead!" Both the movies and television have perpetuated the idea that shooting a man is clean and quick and simple, and when he falls down there is only a small hole, or a blood-stain, to show how he died. Well, killing a man isn't clean and quick and simple. It's bloody and awful. And maybe if enough people come to realize that shooting somebody isn't just fun and games maybe we'll get somewhere about violence on the screen in the first place. [...] No, I don't like violence. In fact, when I look at the film myself, I find it unbearable. I don't think I'll be able to see it again for five years."

"The whole underside of our society has always been violence and still is. Churches, laws--everybody seems to think that man is a noble savage. But he's only an animal. A meat-eating, talking animal. Recognize it. He also has grace and love and beauty. But don't say to me we're not violent."

"Sam's like a fight trainer. He shapes you up, he psyches you, he draws everything out of you. He's subtle, though, yet baroque, and I want to get into that baroqueness. Like the other day, during a scene in which I was supposed to be answering the door and registering surprise. Well, it was the end of the day and I wasn't acting very surprised, so he smashes a beer bottle behind me, right out of camera range. I mean, Christ, I nearly jumped out of my skin. But he got what he wanted."

"His hatred, his loneliness, whatever that he had, his angst, he could not let it go. He had to try to drown it in alcohol. But that's like pouring gasoline on a fire. But he just would not stop. And it was common sense that he should do that, so I'm not sure that he had common sense. He would make people mad and cause fights, and then run, hide; he wouldn't be there. He would, you know, take a punch here or there, but he was not a fighter. He was a little, bitty guy. You could deck him with one punch. I probably could have, you know?"

"There's a communication that goes beyond the realm of words and we don't even need words to communicate, and when you do use words it just comes from our hearts, and we're offering entertainment."

"I am an actor and I'm always going to be an actor and I have fun."

"I can memorize Shakespearian dialogue faster than modern dialogue."

"Goodbye to the brilliant June Lockhart … A one of a kind, talented, nurturing, adventurous, and non compromising Lady. She did it her way. … June will always be one of my very favorite moms … 100 years here. Wow! R.I.P. 👍🏼✌️❤️🙏🏻"

"I thought it was silly when people have that “my dog is better than your dog” mentality. I enjoyed Star Trek as a kid and I’m sure there were plenty of Trekkies who secretly liked Lost in Space."

"I find the science fiction community, in general, is a very positive group of people. Yes, sometimes they may be a little awkward or not mainstream, although I think over the last decade they’ve had to become more mainstream because of the Marvel films and things like that. But, in general, the sci fi community is very involved in the environment. They are very pro-space program. They want to reach beyond our own horizons. They’re never prejudiced against any race or religion or people like that. It’s a good group, generally speaking. But there’s always a percentage that take it a little too seriously, perhaps. They buy into Klingon reality a bit more so than it was intended by the creators. I’ve been doing the science fiction conventions and personal appearances since they were formulated, so I’m quite used to some oddities."

"I wanted to try it out because my cool older brother was doing it."