Gabriel Mann Quotes

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 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.

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 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.

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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 'Dawson's 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?'

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

I think that music is still a mystery to most people. It kind of goes through most people without a specific thought. They feel the music, which is what's supposed to happen. They're not supposed to be curious about who wrote the music; they're supposed to feel what the show is trying to get them to feel. So if I help get that feeling across, that's good enough for me.

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

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

I thought for a minute about an actor and a musician simultaneously, but I think that's always very loaded as an actor when you become a "slash," and you do an actor "slash" anything. You better be really, really good at it.

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.

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

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.

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.

One thing I loved about New Zealand was the indoor/outdoor lifestyle of the place.

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!"

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?"

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.

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