I'll find myself having dinner with people and someone will mention something and I will say I was in that situation once. Then I'll say, forget it, it was a scene I was in. That can get to be quite confusing.
Research can be interesting, but it can be pointless as well. The realities of making a movie often are not conducive with that. I'm not knocking it. I love doing research myself, but I admit it doesn't always add to the performance.
I never try to guess what anyone else will take from a movie. Every movie is such a different experience for each and every person. I don't like it when people try telling people what they should take from a movie. You should go see it with fresh eyes and see for themselves.
I don't like filmmakers to tell people how they should react to their movies. I absolutely have favorites, and I have others that I'm mortified by, but I keep that to myself. I think I've managed to find some very interesting things that I've been very satisfied with recently. I don't know if that's gonna keep going.
I'm not really into musicals.
I was born in Wales but I'm not Welsh - I'm English.
Art is something to be proud of. Art is no compromise.
Essentially, I'm untrained, so I just go with my imagination and try to put myself as solidly as I can into the shoes of whatever person I'm going to be playing.
I like the idea of movies having a magic element. How many times have you seen an actor in a movie who you know only as the character? It's wonderful, isn't it?
Planning a career, I always find a tricky thing, because I don't have much of a plan, really.
There are occasions when I've pretended to be in a firefight, and then there are people who have really been in a firefight. Clearly it's absolutely ridiculous, and even disrespectful, to suggest that I understand what that is.
There was a great complexity to my father. He was a devoted family man. But, in the same breath, he simply was not suited to an anchored life. He should have been somebody who had a backpack, an old map, a bit of change in his pocket and that was it - roaming the world.
The risk element only came from acknowledging other people's attitudes toward it, and realizing that they considered it to be a risk for me to do.
When I imagined my life, I always thought I'd be in my mid-30s before I felt capable of marrying. But I suddenly found that I'd met somebody and I said, "Screw it. I'm not gonna sit here saying, 'Oh no, I'm not ready,' and regret not having done this later on and the possibility of not having this person around." I thought, I'll jump into it and we'll figure it out as we go along.
There's a level of confidence in the actor you're working with that really helps a lot. It makes all the difference.
I started my career without fans.
A lot of actors say that theater's the thing for them. And that's great, and I'm not one to speak with any authority about it because of not having done it properly. For me, movies are what I love.
You get those occasional moments when you're absolutely calm, and you've just done something that would have scared you shitless earlier that day, and you've just done it like it was nothing. I find that very relaxing.
Look, I've got incredible pride for my family. I've absolutely fallen into that cliche of a dad who could just happily talk about my daughter endlessly.
Suddenly people were saying I was cocky because I'd done a Steven Spielberg movie and thought I was better than everyone else, which surprised me at first. I suddenly started feeling like a freak because everyone was treating me differently. It was confusing, and I did wonder if acting was for me anymore.
I've always believed that the director does whatever the hell he wants. That's what you sign on for as an actor - I can't stand it when you have actors who are trying to leverage directors into doing things they don't want to do.
It was just the two of us, inside there with just mirrors, all the way around us. Everywhere we looked, there were these two freaks, sitting at a table, eyeballing each other.
You're creating a different world and the actor's job is to be able to convince the audience to enter into that world, whether it be actually something that you recognize from your own life or not.
A movie star is someone people look at and go, 'I want to be like that person'. There's the responsibility of desire. It's not something I'm interested in trying. I would fail miserably at it, so why even bother?
What I like about it is that I'm not somebody who's in movies. I'm a guy who's not very good going around the track with a bunch of guys who are a hell of a lot better.
