I hardly even leave my own house.
Standing in front of a fake mountain with fake snow falling and seven girls dressed as Santarettes will stay in my memory.
It's more than usually possible that I won't do a play again. But Skylight is one of the great plays in the English language. I was lucky enough to be a part of it at one point in its life, and it's a timely thing to deliver it again in the modern world.
Opening a play is just tough. The idea that actors are weirdly protected from it is a myth. If you imagine yourself having to spend two and a bit hours cooking bolognaise, remembering a whole major work by David Hare and speaking it at the correct moment between chopping carrots and stirring the onions in front of an audience - the normal human response is 'Please, can I go to the airport?'
I love imaginative representations of a possible near-future, where you look at the technology and you think, "Well, yeah, that could really nearly be true." I like those kinds of backgrounds.
I admire David Hare as much as I admire certainly any writer ever. What I like about his writing is it is very conscientiously, in one way, an attempt to reproduce the way people actually speak, but it's not just an attempt at naturalism. It's stylised and it's heightened, to great effect. It's elegant and it's funny and that's the way to my heart, frankly.
I have no memory, any at all, of actually performing the play, no recall in terms of the lines. I can't tell you any line from any play I've ever done.
A way of describing performances that I admire is that there is an absence of careerism. It's a clumsy way of describing it but it sort of does it for me.
From my point of view, it's very refreshing to play a regular human being and not someone from another dimension. When I say "not act," what I mean is just to be as natural and as normal as possible.
I am a fan of rehearsal. I like doing it [scene] over and over and over and over until it looks like you never did it before.
I don't think there's an improvised word in the movie. I hope not because I admire writing. Improvising is kind of gambling. It's just that you're standing up.
I'm not good at watching myself which I think is perfectly natural. I don't give myself a hard time about it. I am the worst critic.
When you are in something that you're proud of and it's funny and it's a good night out and all of those things, there's nothing quite like it. The rewards are proportionate to the amount of alarm and distress it causes you.
I'm crazy about James Brown. I'm crazy about soul music. And then the blues. Rhythm and blues.
I really have no interest in delivering the iambic pentameter, I just want to kill myself. I don't mind other people doing it. I say that, but really I don't want to watch other people doing it. I get embarrassed.
I quoted David Hare one of his lines the other day to illuminate whatever point we were trying to make in the conversation, and I said 'What play was that?' and he said 'It was your line, you said it about a hundred and fifty times in The Vertical Hour.'
If you ask any actor "What single thing would make you really, really happy?" Among the top five things they'd say is not having to audition anymore.
You tell yourself that you're not auditioning but of course you work like crazy, and you prepare like mad. And you think, "Well, I won't get that job. But maybe they'll have another job sometime, and they'll remember that I was good."
I like American black soul music, that was my first big enthusiasm.
I'm probably the only person who actually remembers pirate radio.
In the street, people talk to you about all kinds of things, but by far, the most number of people talk to me about Love, Actually.
I'm lucky that I get to play a wide variety of parts.
I do think 3D has seriously improved, since I was a boy. It's fabulous.
I have never owned a computer. I am one of those weirdos. I've never needed a computer. I'm lucky that I have a job where I'm not required to use one.
One is that you legislate according to natural selection, the other is that you don't. You have compassion, you try and help people. It's a fundamental clash between two people who happen to love each other, which complicates everything.
