A good actor is somebody who can be truthful and fascinating and interesting and enlightening.
Actors, lots of times, are great when they have great parts. For me, a lot of times, it's been the part.
Characters that have a journey - that's what I find most interesting.
Don't take it personally when you are rejected. Be simple. Be truthful. That's pretty much what Hume Cronyn used to tell me.
From there I ended up - my theater history graduate teacher student, a girl named Theresa Germanese, she basically said, 'You've got to get out of here. You've got to go to New York and be an actor. I'm kicking you out.
Hollywood could use less instead of more of everything.
I just love the work of acting, that role of processing. It's something you can keep working on until you drop.
I love villains. You know, I am a character actor, and any chance to get to play a really outrageous villain. I like to play that.
I spent my whole life figuring out how to get out of work. I would say I was intelligent, but intelligent in a very surreptitious, invisible way.
I think tolerance is something everybody needs to be reminded of, especially in a reactionary political world. Well, actually, I should say, a reactionary political climate.
I was always a visual person. I could see things visually. I had a harder time with numbers and logic, and I always had more of an artistic sensibility. So that I could do. And it was something that I really loved.
I was into casting at an early age.
I'm over there filming in South Africa now, and two in five are HIV-positive now. Not many people know that.
It was quite a ride and very conflicting for me, too - to be nominated for an Oscar, to be straight and healthy, and to be getting all these accolades while these people around me were suffering and dying from AIDS.
'Longtime Companion' certainly changed everything for me, and 'X-Men' took away everybody remembering me as David.
That letting-go scene in 'Longtime Companion' has so much resonance for people. It's sort of a door, a passage that everybody has to go through - a sort of archetypical homage for everybody.
That's always something that's really important for an actor - to find an opportunity to do a scene where there is a moment like that, where you manage to connect with everyone.
You have cocktails for 250,000 people when millions upon millions are sick.
Although it is indicated in X2 (2003) that his character, Senator Kelly, is at least 20 years younger than Brian Cox's character, William Stryker, in real life, he is only 27 days younger.
Davison credits directors Robert Aldrich, with whom he worked on Ulzana's Raid, and William A. Wellman as the most influential people in his life. Aldrich once advised him, "Kid, be a character actor. Hero or villain, character actors always work."
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