Jackie Earle Haley Quotations

I bite the hell out of my fingernails. I can't stop. I should stop. It would be nice to grow my fingernails out. It would be healthier. I could pick up dimes.

My dad and me were incredibly close. He was an actor, and so him and I shared this whole movie-world thing closer than anyone else in the family.

When you act, it's better not to fake the emotion. It's better to find the emotion within yourself and your experiences, and see if you can bring that back to the surface, so that you can then literally hand it off to the character, and then let him run with it.

I don't know what I could say specifically, except that everything I've learned as a kid of course must somehow play into what I do now. I think when everything kind of drifted away, I had to go out into the world and learn how to emotionally be okay with all that, which to me was a decades-long process. But also I happened to find my way in life, to find a living, to figure out what I wanted to be when I grow up. I think all of that now probably helps me. It probably gives me more life experience to draw from.

I've got a lot of wonderfully talented, creative directors I've worked with in Texas, but the market we're in, they kind of have to write to that. I think we've done some cool, simple spots. I was very comfortable in Texas, and getting ready to push out into national stuff, try to get to that national-type creative, and then I got sidetracked with this stuff.

I've never been a big horror genre fan, but I did go see 'Nightmare on Elm Street' in the theaters and I dug it. I thought it was cool.

When you're talking about Tim Burton, you're talking about a guy that has such a visual sense, an aesthetic, a storytelling style. It's like he's got his own genre.

You know, at this point, my focus still is acting, but I think at some point in time, I definitely want to do some directing, I'm just not sure when. But it's not on my plate big-time right now, just because I'm busy, and I'm having such a great time.

I'm an actor, I worry about everything.

Playing Willie Loomis was really fun for me because it was something nice and different to embody. It was neat playing this drunken servant who was hypnotized by Johnny Depp.