David Morse

“Because I'd only done theater, that's really what I thought most of my life would be. I always figured that movies would be a part of it at some point. I didn't know how or when.”

“I'm acting for the pleasure of it.”

“At 17, I became a member of the Boston Repertory Theatre. I had an opportunity pretty quickly and performed with the theater for six years.”

“You get to the middle of a take that's going really well and the camera will run out of film. They have to stop you, apologize and then you've got to get things going all over again.”

“I was stuck as a Boomer type in a lot of people's minds.”

“I have a DVD player and I have DVDs, and I have no time to watch any of them.”

“In high school, I tried out for every sport there was. But none of them would have me. When I was a freshman, someone asked me to go audition for a play with them. I got in and didn't want to do anything else for the next four years.”

“One year, I went to Cannes with the film 'The Indian Runner' that Sean Penn directed. Everyone else in the film was all the same height, and on the red carpet, when they were taking photos, none of them would stand next to me, and I totally got it.”

“I've always tried to not let movie, television or theatre be all that my life is about. I've always tried to get involved in the community or my family now I have kids.”

“I've had the chance to work with Christopher Plummer, one of the great stage and film actors, a couple of times, including on 'Prototype,' the first TV movie I ever did. It was science fiction in the Ray Bradbury sense, written by the famous team who created Columbo, Levinson, and Link.”

“I've done scenes in films that I felt like the performance was better in certain takes, but they couldn't use them because it didn't match what the person was doing when they came around and the camera was on them.”

“I was getting to the point where I said to my wife, 'I don't think I'll ever be in New York in a play again.'”

“In independent film you tend to have stories that involve more of a community, and the smaller characters are important to the story.”

“'Outsiders,' I guess, is sort of dark, but I don't really think of it as dark. The world up there on that mountain, it had the potential to have a lot of fun as well as a lot of drama, these guys raiding the town in their ATVs with their tattoos. It seemed like something different.”

“There's been one movie star that would not work with me because of my height. I had so many people who had to stand on boxes when they do scenes with me.”

“With Sean Penn, he wants to be surprised. He doesn't necessarily want what he's written, although we'll do what he's written. He likes the danger of acting.”

“I was a teenager and it was tough years for me. Being able to bring myself into a character and live in somebody else's world was so important for me emotionally. I couldn't express things well in my normal life. I was so overwhelmed by my emotions.”

“With repertory, you had to play all these different characters. The range of roles is really what I fell in love with, every night getting to become somebody different. That was my idea of acting, getting to be part of the company and a family.”

“Just in terms of when I got the script, the character I probably liked the least was Big Foster. Because even though he was central to the story and to that world, he was really written to be kind of a brute, a pig, a completely black-and-white bad guy.”

“Big Foster is a guy who was in line to be the head of this clan that's been up in the mountains for 200 years, because his father was the leader or the Bren'in, his mother is now Bren'in, and they're kind of royalty, so he was in line to be next. He'd been promised it from a young age, but it just hasn't happened.”