Peter Coyote
Peter Coyote
Peter Coyote is an American actor, author, director, screenwriter and narrator of films, theatre, television and audiobooks. His voice work includes narrating the opening ceremony of the 2002 Winter Olympics and Apple's iPad Retina Display campaign. He has also served as on-camera co-host of the 2000 Oscar telecasts. His distinctive voice helped him win a News & Documentary Emmy Award in 1992 for narration of "The Meiji Revolution" episode of the PBS series The Pacific Century, as well as a...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionMovie Actor
Date of Birth10 October 1941
CityNew York City, NY
CountryUnited States of America
I am fascinated by women. They're as close as we men get to experiencing 'the other.' The challenge for me was to know and accept fully formed, powerful women.
One of the most treasured books that I own is Donald Allen's 'The New American Poetry, 1945-1960.' It was a totem of great importance and potency to my group of writer friends in college from 1960 to 1964.
We put on shows at Golden Gate Park with the Dead and Jefferson Airplane, and the groups were part of the community they emerged out of, not some superstars. We had multiple stages, diversions, communal entertainment. There is something slightly fascistic about sitting in a huge auditorium focusing all the energy on one group far away on stage.
Writing is something I can do by myself.
Young people, for whom I should have been a role model and an uncle, duplicated my worst habits and died as a result.
My house and my garden are built as part of nature, not over it.
Acting is the way I make my living.
When I went to get my master's in creative writing at San Francisco State after Grinnell, I joined the moribund remnants of the Actor's Workshop, until I saw Kay Hayward and Sandy Archer in the San Francisco Mime Troupe and drove down that day to audition. The rest is history.
In 2001, Texaco was bought by Chevron, and during deliberations concerning that sale, an 800 page document listing the problems and liabilities connected to Texaco was brought forward at their stockholder meeting by Amazon Watch, a non-profit dedicated to protecting the Amazon.
I think you have a social responsibility as the villain, which is pretty different from the hero's responsibility. If you have any kind of a social or political conscience at all, the first thing you want to do is make malevolence recognizable to people, almost as a kind of teaching aid.
We spend all this energy keeping our lives normal and safe and predictable, and the result is that our approved cultural safety valve is the movies. So in films, anyway, the hero is obliged to represent the continuance of social values and institutions, and his permission to act is much more seriously limited than the villain's.
When you break the rules and you win, you're a hero; when you lose, you're scurrilous.
I believe that when you're wrong, own it and apologize, and so I do and put it on the equivalent of my front page.
My gift seems to be that I am able to tell a story in a comprehensible and engaging way.