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Billy falls into the second category.
Do you bowl?I mean, isnt it obvious?
Im a once-every-fourteen-months sort of bowler.
How did you end up playing a bowler on aDocumentary Now!episode?
And ultimately, you have that in mind.
This show is more of a sketch than an oil painting.
Its not a real delve into the psychology of the person.
But youre still just doing your best to behave as if youre this person in these circumstances.
And Billy is a character.
This guy is the best bowler in the world.
Hes very simple, in a way.
He loves being good at them.
And yet hes not on quite as even a keel as we initially believed.No, he isnt.
Did you getDexterflashbacks at all?Ha!
If this guy is a psychopath, hes more of a benign one.
Maybe hes somebody whos seen every episode ofDexterten times?Yeah!
When I read that bit, thats when I said, Okay, I really have to do this.
Id like to ask you some acting questions about your other roles.
Obviously it varies from shot to shot, but your relationship to the camera is consolidated.
And your sense of performance and how to communicate it must be adjusted accordingly.
I dont know if the shot in question even wound up in the final cut.
Interesting.Yes, and so I endeavored to do what Alan suggested.
I was very lucky in that role.
It just so happened that I was able to pour all of those feelings right into the character.
Ive heard actors and filmmakers say that they believe that the camera can record emotion.
Do you think theres any truth to that?I dont know.
I do know that the eyes are the windows to the soul, as they say.
And I know that thought and feeling are ultimately not divergent things.
Have you ever heard Michael Caine talk about acting for film?
He says that if you lean back, or fall back, the camera will catch you.
In a way, doing less allows an audience to project themselves onto a character.
If youre filling in all of the blanks, theres no in for a viewer.
Sometimes if you do a lot less, more will be communicated.
And yet doing more can be fun, as we saw inGame Night.
The Bulgarian was fun, right?Yeah!
Sometimes you get to do things that are a bit more broad.
That was a lot of fun.
That role was a gift.
So many of your songs in that one are fast.
The words are just tumbling out of you.That ventriloquist song especially, there was something vaudevillian about it.
And that role was also the closest Ive ever come to feeling like being a big-band singer.
Because I was already an admirer of the show, I jumped on that ship for a bit.
I knew that would help differentiate him.
He was very much around, and he was just an amazing presence.
He was tremendously kind and enthusiastic and appreciative of what we were all doing.
It was and will remain one of the highlights of my career.
Youre a lymphoma survivor.
How do you process that?
I never really imagined that I would discover I had cancer.
But on the other hand, Ive come out on the other side of it.
And in that sense, its somewhat less of a daunting proposition now.
Once five years passed, that was the case.
