Jeffrey Tambor Quotations

My part had three lines. I said, 'You look wonderful, sir,' three times. All my friends said, 'Do not take that role - and do not understudy. You'll regret it the rest of your life.' I did both of those things, and I've never regretted it once.

Those guys, Scott and Preston, had professionalism, with a capital P. It's a bygone era. I'm getting emotional talking about them.

As my manager says, 'These are wonderful problems.'

It's everything I wanted it to be and more, ... Doing Mamet is working without a net. He's so delicious. I knew he was great, but I did not know that by doing him, you get him. It's like hearing an overture in a musical. There isn't an ounce of fat on this thing. It's great!

They were working on Home of the Brave - deconstructing it, putting it together. I kept coming every day to watch. It seemed beautiful.

I love this company. I don't know how it was selected. It's a bunch of machers. They mean business.

The most telling one was recently on a plane. This guy very dressed up and formal - the watch, the shoes, the cufflinks, the whole nine yards - he came at me, and I thought I was going to get nailed. But he literally came up to me and just gave me a hug and said, "Thank you for introducing me to a subject that I didn't know anything about." In those moments it always clicks for me what we're doing here.

I am not so concerned with how many Rotten Tomatoes we have - although the good reviews are to be wished for, of course - but I have my hands full in the daily housekeeping of doing Maura right and being truthful to this experience.

You keep your head down and you work and work, and all of a sudden you pick your head up and people are receiving it the same way we're sending it. They're thinking the same things that I'm thinking about the show.

I get a singular comment that's very revealing: "I didn't know what to expect." Every time I hear that I think it's really just code for, "I wasn't sure I'd be comfortable with you in this role," which I understand coming from Oscar Bluth and Hank Kingsley and whatever. But I think there's a degree of, "Oh, okay, this is how it is." Then almost always people tell me that they love it and then people start talking to me about their families, whether it's transgender issues or not.

I had a lot of questions where I had to be very frank and clinical. I had to go to school on it about what it could mean physically to be trans and the options that have to be weighed and considered. But I love that. Exploring that opens my worldview in ways that I would never be able to try.

When I was a young boy in San Francisco, I remember being sent home - I was playing with a friend. And I remember the mother saying, tell Jeffrey to go home. And I said to the girl, I said, why? She goes, my mother says that you're the people who killed Christ.

I really loved my dad. I was very, very close to my dad. He - you know, he was very, very nervous about my being an actor.

In my life, I find that in sobriety, I feel much more. And I have much more depth.

I don't like show business. I don't like the business. I love acting. I love this. I love talking to people.

I loved the gentlemanly way they treated each other. It was unlike anything I was used to. I started helping them strike the set and, at 11, began taking acting classes privately.

I came to New York late; I was already past 30

I think your resources are feeling. Your resources are depth. Your resources are learning. Your resources are touching and feeling. And for me, sobriety helps and aids all of that.

This whole thing about winning and losing is muddy waters. But I can remember, as a young actor, just walking around this city and not being able to get arrested.

My education was doing good plays and also stinkers. When you do a stinker, you learn how to act. I like having to audition. It's nice to do rehearsals. But it's with an audience that you get to love it!

My part had three lines. I said, You look wonderful, sir, three times. All my friends said, Do not take that role - and do not understudy. You'll regret it the rest of your life. I did both of those things, and I've never regretted it once.

On the other hand, we don't come to work with all of these social goals, nor are we directly trying to change the world and all of that. Our job is that we have these human characters, and it's our responsibility to play them truthfully and as human as possible. Jill has cast this impeccably. These actors nail it, even the non-Pfeffermans. It's ridiculous.

And I'd watch George C. Scott from backstage. He was one of my mentors.

I remember going to Bob Preston's dressing room because I was losing a laugh - as you do in a long run. He said, 'Give me the script. That's where you're going off the road.' That's comedy. It's never the line itself; it's in the foundation.

The Emmy should be an ensemble award, too. I kept howling at everyone else's performances.

I thought that the hardest part would be the external - would be the - oh, nails and the hair and the makeup and the dress and the heels and the blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And actually, that wasn't the hardest. That was very, very, very easy for me, and I liked it.

Joe Mantello is the uber director. I wrote him a card tonight saying basically, 'Will you adopt me?'

When I got this role, my daughter Molly said, 'Dad, you've come full circle.

You push a button and it goes all over the world and on Sunday people are saying, 'Oh, I binge watched all 10 of them. Where's more?' and you go oh, the world has changed. It's not my dad walking to the television set and turning a knob to Ed Sullivan.

Gordon and I run our scene every night prior to the performance, just to get the cadences. I don't think Gordon would mind my telling you that.