i began to study at various places in the loft studio studied with some other teachers i read
all the books that you could read and all that was great but you realize that
the only way to learn how to is not act necessarily the only way to learn how to
react and behave because it's just behavior and its reaction was to do it it's on the job training
it's trial by fire so i did my best to work up my own approach towards character and such
in my life i've always um i've always had a long floor acting long before the music
it became an obsession and it became necessary for me i was always thinking
um but just you know you paint it and you put it off to the side you know
for many years i limited myself away from any sort of painting or showing any paintings
because the idea of making it or succeeding having success in one field and then using that to
instigate some other thing all together i i i was afraid of that you know
i had i had far too much respect for art to try to put myself in into that world just because
people knew me as an actor i didn't like that it didn't sit well with me but um what i did was i
limited myself and that's something that you know what you'd ever do no one should ever do
it's only so many years on this planet now marlon uh
brando said that life is a good life is a very strong so basically what happened
was after so many years of limiting myself not allowing myself to show anything that i painted
though i've painted for many years and always stuck with it i just didn't want to show it
and i think now is a very good time to embrace the fear or whatever and yeah show it
i think when i'm looking into the face of hunter thompson or these
friends these people that i've cared about so much there is without question truth in
what happens to these portraits so to kick things off i've decided to release a series of energy
portraits of dear friends of mine who've mattered to me a great deal they will be released under the
title never fear of truth this creed of uh never fear truth has always been very very
important to me and uh somewhat of an obsession but it has never been more important to me
than in recent years by creating these portraits what it does is it allows me to give back
and the idea is to start a community and on top of that in particular it allows me the opportunity to
support um a couple of very important organizations who have been very very
special and important to me and my family over the years what i truly truly hope is that um
that you enjoy
the work um that you are able to take something from him you're gonna smile when i when i became
an actor um it was it was quite by accident um i was in a i was a musician and i was in abandon and
kind of broke up and i didn't know what else to do and you know you gotta pay the rent
even you know when i was a kid back then i didn't want to do the formulae
pitter-patter stuff you know i i thought well if i'm if i'm gonna go from being a musician
you know a guitarist to an actor there's only one way to approach it really which is
kind of the same way that you approach music and so at the time i remember thinking i think
there's a general lack of punk rock actors in the in the neighborhood of hollywood so i made this
vow to myself that i would only do the
things that i um wanted to do to take the road that i i thought was really the only right road
for me um music is is still uh a huge part of it because uh well because music is the instant um
it's instantly effective with regard to emotion a certain song will take you back to some memory
um from childhood or whatever um and you apply these things to the words or the work
what really helps you find that character is when you get into the ring
with other actors which pushed me well the last thing i want to look like is myself yeah
i've always felt that it was important to escape i always figured if i just did the
same thing over and over i'd not only bore myself but i'd bore the audience you know
i somehow in my mind i saw this opportunity like a way to mesh characters black cartoon characters
so i started thinking about the parameters that were available to cartoon characters
so i tried to incorporate these kind of ideas into the character of captain jack sparrow so
that i could try to push those parameters and control the sort of suspension of disbelief to
be able to control the characters actions words movements cartoon characters can get away with
things we can't captain jack sparrow can do things that i could never do he could say
things that i could never say so it was for me a way to stretch the parameters of of a character
captain jack sparrow was a character that i had
built from the ground up um and with something that i
i of course put a lot of my as you do with all characters but you put a lot of yourself
into the characters and also having worked on these films with these people and
having added much of myself much of my own uh um rewriting the dialogue and scenes and the
jokes and whatever they are um i didn't quite understand
how that after that long relationship and quite a successful relationship
certainly for disney um that they would but suddenly i was guilty until proven innocent
the same the very same way that i've ever approached any character you you you look for
a back history you base it on you know it could be anything like edward scissorhands for example was
i based on a dog that i'd had and newborn babies my sister had a couple of new babies and i watched
them you know because i thought that edward would see things from a place of innocence and also
that that blue look of innocent child when they experienced something for the first time those
were the the two main ingredients that i thought would serve the character it's not like you become
that person but if if you know that character to the degree that i did once you know a character
better than the writers that's when you you have to be true to the character and add your words
you