“I’ve had very, very, very good luck. I mean, my wish would be that I could live longer and continue having good luck.
“If you believe that people ultimately get what they deserve, a lot of bad things would happen to me very soon, because I really had uncannily good luck.”
Shawn, who voices Rex the dinosaur in the Toy Story film series, credited his “privileged” upbringing – mum Cecille was a journalist, and dad William was the editor of the New Yorker – for a successful life.
Wallace Shawn credits his privileged upbringing for his successful life and career. Photo / Getty Images
“People who have good luck have tools to grab more good luck. I came from a privileged background. I didn’t know that, and my parents were not, in a strange way, very conscious of it either. But I had every opportunity.
“For a brief period, I thought maybe I would lead a humbler sort of life, much humbler than my parents’ life. Then, I became an actor, and I returned to having a pretty comfortable bourgeois life. In a way, I’m still downwardly mobile from my parents …
“But I don’t think my mother ever had a cappuccino. So am I downwardly mobile or upwardly mobile? Because I can have cappuccinos all the time.”
Shawn reflected on his many credits over more than 50 years, including Young Sheldon, The Princess Bride and Clueless.
“A lot of actors don’t like to watch themselves. For me, it’s my new hobby or something. I don’t expect you to understand, but time telescopes backwards.
“The last 49 years that I’ve been acting feel like a very short part of my life, and something I took up quite recently and never expected to do. I don’t feel some of the things that people who always dreamed of being actors feel.
“Obviously, I have little moments of being upset, where I think, ‘I didn’t do that moment very well.’”