From 1965 to 1974, I served the best possible apprenticeship for an actor. I learned firsthand how a truck driver lives, what a bartender does, how a salesman thinks. I had to make a life inside those jobs, not just pretend.
My grandfather was a really, really tough no-nonsense factory worker who emigrated from Ireland in about 1900 to Bridgeport, Conn. He had a big effect on me. Those guys who took a great leap out into what they knew not were the ones who were the real stars, the real heroes.
No one would ever cast me as an aristocrat. I think the big thing about being an Irish artist is access to melancholy. Especially the American Irish. The availability of loss, some kind of pain, is an important part of who we are. I think my Irishness gave me that.
It'd be very difficult to cast me as a ballet dancer. Everybody is, in some sense, controlled by their size and their gender. I'm not going to be allowed to play the part that Denzel Washington plays.
In this business, you have a hierarchy of stars. Russell Crowe, Tom Hanks - you name 'em, they can play any part they want. Guys like me who are somewhere down in the middle of the pack, that's a different story. I can do things in the theater that I can't do anyplace else.
The theater business has allowed me, in a way the movie and TV business has not, to do very, very interesting work. So that's what I do.
The older I get, the more interesting the part has to be. Bobby Knight is extremely interesting.
As the stars make more and more money - one person gets $12 million, $14 million, $15 million, $20 million - everyone else is expected to work for peanuts. And that includes some extraordinary actors who are, today, working for peanuts because the production companies have decided they don't need to pay these people, and they don't.
My father had a good sense of humour about a lot of things, including life, which I think I inherited.
