Gabriel Mann Quotations

For most of my 20s, I looked like I was 12. Now that I'm pushing 40, I guess I look closer to... 15? It must be my macrobiotic diet. Oh, wait, except that I don't have one of those.

Whenever somebody hates you too much it usually means they have deeper feelings for you because nobody bothers to hate you unless they actually feel something.

I play Father Francis in 'The Exorcist Prequel.' It's fantastic. We are shooting in Morrocco and Rome. Paul Schrader is directing; Stellan Skarsgard plays the younger Max Von Sydow character. It's just a fantastic script. It's a very eerie, very scary script. It encomposes a growing dread that I think is really appropriate for the film.

My father is a college professor and that's about the extent of my college experience. I'm sort of a professional student forever. I think just as human beings we always have a student who is alive in us and is waiting to pop up and make us feel like we are 16 years-old again.

I'm a late bloomer. I believe 40 is the new 19.

When I started in the mid-'90s, the goal was really to shoot for a film career and stay there.

I think you kind of hope for people to gush over movies, but I think the opposite way is great sometimes, too. I'd rather have a movie that you're angry about and that you're talking about the next day, than something you forget about when the popcorn goes into the trash.

Nolan has the strangest affect on people. You know, I think there's something very sad and little boy about him, but at the same time the way he goes about everything is so awkward and obnoxious. He can never say the right thing, you know? And I think if he just didn't try so hard and calmed down, people might actually like him a bit more!

I do like to turn a phrase, but it's all about how you turn it.

All I had, originally, were pages of Nolan's dialogue. I think his character serves the story in a nice way. He's a Greek chorus for the goings-on in the Hamptons.

My role models were always the Pacinos and the Oldmans, the guys who get dirty with their characters, and I arrived in L.A. during the big boom of Dawsons Creek. I was getting cast as the boy next door, or the friend of the jock. I thought, Did I really have to do all that studying?

The only description for Nolan in the script was that he's a very bad dresser. I put on a red windbreaker and every other ugly, ill-fitting thing I could dig out. He was potentially written as a clean-cut nerd, but I wanted a darker spin.

But TV has changed completely. It's not until you come into people's homes that everyone says, 'You're a success now.'

Sometimes people ask me how old I am, and I have to stop and remember. I forget myself!

I'm not going to lie. I would definitely steal stuff from set.

Like I said, when all of that goes away and you just completely lose yourself in the fantasy of it, then that's usually when I walk out of the theatre or turn off the television and just go: "That was brilliant!"

Anytime anybody does anything - unless it's in the realm of the obviously awful, which is fun too in a different way - it is in many ways a success.

The craft of putting together a performance on film or television is incredibly intricate; you're putting together a story that is completely out of order, that you have to make some sense of, that you have to keep some coherence to the story, to the character.

I know when I watch a film at this point, if I completely lose myself in the characters and the story and the world of the film I know that it's at least in my opinion, that was great. Otherwise I'm thinking: "Oh I know they were just doing A, B and C, right before they walked into the scene, then the camera was there, then they probably took the shot from this reverse close-up and moved it into this." When all of that drops away then I'm like: "Okay this was phenomenal, this was fantastic." I mean, any film or TV performance in general is probably good.

For me as an actor because I've been at it so long, it becomes much harder to watch movies because you really see the seams of everything.

I wanted to be in an anti-gravity machine so bad! Maybe a different time, a different place.

It's funny, people talk about the characters they play and who do you sort of see yourself as or which ones maybe were closest to you and in some ways.

The last thing I thought that was utterly brilliant was the season finale of the last season of 'Homeland'. I was just completely and utterly speechless and I think my friend was poking me going: "What did you think?"

Maybe that's partly why I'm an actor, I'm a fairly empathetic, emotional person, so I get very, very involved when it's really, really great when I'm watching - so it takes me a second to click back into reality again.

I kind of grew up in a commune, but it wasn't a hippie commune necessarily, but it was a big house with a lot of families, we all lived together and it was the 70s, whatever that means.

There's a really brilliant photographer who's deceased who in my sort of fashion and modelling days, I was fortunate enough to get to work with before he passed away, but Richard Avedon was utterly genius and creatively brilliant.

I've had a reoccurring dream about hanging out with Britney Spears, so maybe it would be fun to chill with her for a bit? Like, see what makes her tick. I had this dream once about Britney, that we were going to get married or something, and so I had to meet her parents but we were stuck on a beach in these sand dunes - and at this point between the dreams and self-portrait, you know way too much about me.

If we're talking music I could go on and on and on.

We've been talking about Lorde like crazy! She's amazing!

I have a million story-lines for 'Revenge' and they never listen to me.

I needed to put something together that would continually get me up at 4:30 in the morning, get me to work and get me excited to throw on those costumes - which clearly continue to excite me, if you are a viewer of the show - and circumstances that continue to surprise me and ask me to go places acting-wise that I haven't explored before.

I never wanted to get caught in doing something that was really one note.

One thing I loved about New Zealand was the indoor/outdoor lifestyle of the place. I remember going from Xboxing, jamming out on guitars and drum machines in my buddy's apartment, to a bike ride through the parks and up and down the streets all over the city, to the ocean, right into the water. I remember we were swimming outer ways and we got to a certain place where we wanted to see - or I wanted to see - how deep the water was.

I think you kind of hope for people gush over movies, but I think the opposite is great sometimes, too. I'd rather have a movie that you're angry about and that you're talking about the next day, than something you forget about when the popcorn goes into the trash.