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"  ON THE IPAD: Watch a Video Interview with Jeffrey Tambor &amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;gt; My first agent called me &amp;quot;Hot Ticket,&amp;quot; and I thought that was great. &amp;quot;Hey, Hot Ticket!&amp;quot; Until I realized he had no idea what my name is. That&amp;#039;s why he called me Hot Ticket. People having their picture taken with me is the new autograph. The moment you think you&amp;#039;re somebody, you&amp;#039;re nobody. I&amp;#039;m doing the Phil Spector movie for HBO with the likes of David Mamet, Al Pacino, and Helen Mirren. Then I come back to do Yo Gabba Gabba! That&amp;#039;s all I&amp;#039;ve ever wanted. When I was training to be bar mitzvahed \u2014 at gunpoint \u2014 my cantor ate cottage-cheese sandwiches. I had trouble with the baruch sound. The cantor would go, &amp;quot;No, Jeff, baruKH.&amp;quot; And these curds would come flying across the table and hit me. And they smelled like sour milk. This was not good for Judaism or me. My whole life has never been what&amp;#039;s in front of me. It&amp;#039;s been Huh? Oh? I&amp;#039;ll tell you where I&amp;#039;m cool. I played Mr. Salomone in Eloise at the Plaza. And little girls stop and say, &amp;quot;Mommy, Mommy! That&amp;#039;s Mr. Salomone!&amp;quot; That&amp;#039;s so cool. I love it. I really do. All I ever wanted to be was a character actor. Lee J. Cobb. Charles Laughton. Just to go from role to role. I never thought of fame. I still don&amp;#039;t think of fame. My son asked me if I was famous. I said I was going to do this interview and he said, &amp;quot;Will this make you famous?&amp;quot; I said yes. He laughed and thought it was great. Did you know that Orson Welles had a jazz band on the set of Citizen Kane? I guess his lesson was if you&amp;#039;re reinventing the wheel, you&amp;#039;ve got to be in a good mood. I don&amp;#039;t even believe in preparation that much. I know because I&amp;#039;ve anguished over this. I&amp;#039;ve anguished. I&amp;#039;m the guy who used to drive to the set the day before to rehearse the drive to the set. That&amp;#039;s sick. You don&amp;#039;t want to do that \u2014 to rehearse how to park. That is not life. My sense of humor comes from a very Darwinian place. I don&amp;#039;t think I had a sense of humor as a kid. I think I adapted it. I wasn&amp;#039;t what you would call a click-your-heels kind of happy kid. I was very dry. I was overweight. I had a bilateral lisp. I think those are all the reasons I went into acting. I sure didn&amp;#039;t want to be me, so why not be somebody else? I don&amp;#039;t think anger gets anything done. For a while, when I was heavier and had a mustache, people thought I was Dr. Phil. I was on Dr. Phil&amp;#039;s show. I was goofing with him a little bit. I was imitating him. And the audience laughed. So I imitated him again. He put his foot down. I put my foot down. He put his foot up. I put my foot up. And then I saw something in his eyes that said, &amp;quot;That&amp;#039;s as far as we&amp;#039;re going on that piece of business. That will be enough.&amp;quot; It was quite something. And I thought, This is not a weakling. This is a strong guy! Oh, ho, ho! Age is a number. We didn&amp;#039;t have a nanny this weekend, so I felt sixty-seven. Chekhov has this wonderful line in The Harmfulness of Tobacco. He says, &amp;quot;There&amp;#039;s no one I can open my heart to.&amp;quot; Ultimately, love is about opening your heart and being received for who you are. First you have to love here before you can go there. So that&amp;#039;s the work. When you go into a restaurant, you can tell who&amp;#039;s married and who isn&amp;#039;t. The married people are not talking. I&amp;#039;m not a big fan of looking at myself. I&amp;#039;m still trying to get over that I&amp;#039;m bald. Who needs the truth? Truth is far overrated. If you&amp;#039;re backstage, say, &amp;quot;Great. Great. Wonderful!&amp;quot; Everybody needs a pat on the back out here, you know? They found Burton, when he was doing Hamlet, preparing in front of the curtain. He was yelling, &amp;quot;You fuckers, fuck you!&amp;quot; He was yelling at the audience so that he could perform in front of them without fear. It&amp;#039;s fear, baby. That&amp;#039;s the whole thing. Fuck &amp;#039;em. I&amp;#039;ll tell you about one of the favorite times of the day. We have a thing at night, and we are religious about it, where we get the babies to bed at seven o&amp;#039;clock, the twin boys, and we turn off the lights, and we have these two rockers. My wife sings to them, and I hold one of them. And they put their heads right in here, and we rock, and you can hear their little breathing noses. There&amp;#039;s just nothing like that. Sometimes when Eli or Hugo puts their mouth right there, you almost breathe in what they&amp;#039;re breathing. Match that. That&amp;#039;s where I am right now. The secret of life is to be surrounded by people who get you \u2014 just the people who get you. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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