John Hawkes

I've never had any delusions about being a leading man, and it's not sour grapes to say that in the best films that I've always enjoyed, the cliched leading man type isn't a part of the picture.

Certainly I've had the experience of thinking a person was one thing, and finding out they were another.

Starting in the mid-'80s, I played in a band called Meat Joy, and we made our own record, toured.

I don't have any training as an actor, but I guess I'm an intense pretender. When you read something over and over, it gets into you a little bit. You can't help but begin to feel it, even if you're a healthy person as I think I am.

It's much more interesting to watch someone who is ill-equipped to solve their problem fight to solve their problem than wallow in the knowledge that they're ill-equipped to solve their problems.

I don't have actor training myself.

The New York Times' thing... I think any actor would be thrilled to be profiled in that paper.

Some friends of mine bothered me for a long time about getting on the social networking pages. They were close friends that I liked to mess with, and I think that I kind of enjoyed for a while that it bothered them so much. Now they've just kind of given up.

As an actor you have to have a strong vivid imagination as you're working and when the camera's rolling, but there's certainly a part of you that is aware of real life, that you're making a movie.

In the time between when you first read a script and are offered the role and the time when you begin to shoot, I really love putting in the time and work on that and getting a solid backstory to a character and researching all that I can about what that person does for a vocation or their upbringing or where they're from.

Part of the way that I work is to observe.

I understand why people achieve a level of fame and disappear, I never understood it before, but it's an attractive prospect to walk away from it all.