Sylvester McCoy Quotes.
On stage you look much larger than you are. You can have subtle changes of timing; how you place a punch line in a joke or movement or emotion according to an audience.
Theatre is the principal job of an actor. An actor’s job is to tell a story to someone in a room. TV and film can be great and I really love doing it, but it is a different way of telling a story.
On stage you look much larger than you are. You can have subtle changes of timing; how you place a punchline in a joke or movement or emotion according to an audience.
Now I’m old… maybe I’m still an eccentric hippie. There’s a wonderful freedom in the eccentricity – you can go places, you can be wacky, and you don’t have to be constrained. I think that’s why people are eccentric – eccentricity is a weapon… and it’s great!
I have the philosophy of yes. If anybody asks me to do a job, I say, ‘Yes.’ I’ve said yes to everything.
I don’t relax. I sit down and contemplate all the energetic things I should do.
I quite enjoy fame, especially when you go to conventions in America where they treat you like a god with stretch limos and the whole fame thing, but then when you come back to Britain, you end up changing in a toilet in a theatre off West End and that’s really good, because that is what it’s about.
They were the books to read, ‘The Hobbit’ and ‘The Lord of the Rings.’ A rite of passage going through life.
As far as I’m concerned, an audience is an audience. Whether it’s an audience in Hull or the National Theatre, that’s who you play to. It’s not money – it’s good to get some, but that’s not why I do it. You do it because you have to, to tell a story.
There’s always pressure on filming. There’s the weather, people, various different technical problems. There’s always pressure! And there’s never really enough time for anything, really!
I once went to a ‘Star Trek’ convention by mistake – I thought I was going to a ‘Doctor Who’ one.
In acting, quite a lot of the time you’re not the first choice. Usually, you’re second or third. And it can turn out to be the best thing that ever happened. You get used to that.
There’s still a part of me that believes what was great about ‘Doctor Who’ in the early days was that you had a superhero who didn’t wear his underpants on the outside of his trousers, who used his brain rather than his brawn.
If anybody asks me to do a job, I say, ‘Yes.’ I’ve said yes to everything.
I’ve never planned my career, really. It just comes along, and I do whatever comes next!
I think back to my time in children’s television, back in the 1970s, and the amount of innovation that was going on then. Because the mass market wasn’t focused on it, so you had a freedom to do amazing things, like ‘Vision On,’ and ‘Tiswas.’
Every great decision creates ripples. Like a huge boulder dropping in a lake. The ripples merge and rebound off the banks in unforseeable ways. The heavier the decision, the larger the waves, the more uncertain the consequences.
