I never make conscious decisions. If my agent says to me, "It's a good script," I'll do it. I don't plan. I've got a lot of things to do. I'm at the roulette table and my luck seems to be running at the moment. I might as well stay there until it runs out.
When I was a younger actor, I was very immersed in it, very "method" and all that. Now, I don't give a hoot.
We're all different. Some people are musicians, some people are actors, some people are agents and some people are accountants... We're all different.
I wanted to be a musician. I just wanted to be famous because I wanted to escape from what I felt was my limitation in life... And I wanted to write music, and I didn’t know what I was doing and I never had the technique or understanding of it... But I’ve always played the piano and I can improvise on the piano, but the problem is that I can’t write down what I write. I can read music but I can’t write numbers.
In the theatre, people talk. Talk, talk until the cows come home about journeys of discovery and about what Hazlitt thought of a line of Shakespeare. I can't stand it.
I thought I did play one villain, Hitler, [who is] like Lecter in some ways, but he's a mythical figure, anyway.
I'm devious, cruel, cunning and addictive.
My weak spot is that I don't like analyzing so I tend to be a bit lazy; I tend to get bored quickly, which means I must be boring.
I like the good life too much, I'm not good at going on stage night after night and on wet Wednesday afternoons.
People ask, 'Should I call you Sir Hopkins?' But I say, 'No. Call me Tony,' because it's too much of a lift-up.
I'm composing and writing music.
What I do is just go over and over and over my lines and learn the script so well that I can just be easy and relaxed. That's the way I always work.
And I love a scary movie. It makes your toes curl and it's not you going through it.
I love the hour in makeup. It gives you time to think and have a cup of coffee. It's my favorite part of the day.
The knighthood was a tremendous honour, I don't dismiss it. But I feel embarrassed by the flowery, theatrical stuff that goes with being an actor.
People ask me how did you choose the part and how did you prepare for this work? I just learned the lines and showed up; I don't know what else to say because that's all I know how to do.
When you are at the right age to play Hamlet you are still to young and immature to play it. It is much later, when you get the life experience and the emotional power, that you understand Hamlet or Macbeth.
You still wake up sometimes. You wake up in the dark and hear the screaming of the lambs.
Shakespeare's so bloody difficult, and I don't like failure. You can fail on film, but there's nobody actually there in the flesh to watch you failing.
My life is not my own business.
I've played a lot of parts. But I don't look at my feeling is that this is a job. It's given me a good living.
I always distrust the word art when it is applied to acting.
I could stay making nice safe BBC movies for the rest of my life, so I decided to risk it. It was a challenge, to work with Oliver Stone.
Things have changed so much now. Everything is downloaded onto computers. I'm not a computer-savvy guy, but with downloading the movie industry has changed.
It's such a pleasant surprise when you come on set and you find someone in charge like Ken Branagh or James Ivory. You know that you're going to do a day's work and at the end of it, it's going to be good.
