I have always refused to do something that has offended me. I have been offered potential roles that are totally vulgar.
You never forget how to dance. It's just a matter of your bones working and things like that.
It's true in most movies I don't use my own voice.
I grew up in music theater playing to the audience - singing and dancing and showing off. That's really my background. But the camera's different. I think I'm more at home on stage.
There are places I don't want to go. Making movies on tops of mountains, in the desert, playing scenes while icy torrents of rivers rush by. The jungle. It's very uncomfortable.
I want to make movies on a soundstage. They close the door and it's nighttime, daytime. If it has to rain, they make the rain. That's what I like.
I suppose in order to succeed at something you have to be very persistent. I've never done that.
I live sort of in the country and I like that. It's very quiet, it's beautiful.
It's very hard to get a movie made. You could spend your life reading scripts that never got made.
I became an actor kind of by accident. I was in musical theater and I got a job as an actor in a play and kept going. But I never set out to be an actor; it happened over time.
I always like to watch comics and it's interesting that you can tell if someone's funny in 10 seconds.
In England, and all over Europe, and all over the world, actors act until they die. They get old, really old, and they're still working. They just keep doing it.
I have made a number of movies that I have never seen. It's not a matter of ego. It's a matter of being disappointed. It's really a shame. It's just as difficult to make a movie that no one cares about as to make a hit.
Older actors, and women in particular, are getting more opportunities. It pleases me, its very good news for us. They say that people are living longer, and maybe it's just that there's more of us out there.
As an actor I'm rather hit and miss, I throw a lot out there, and some of it works and some of it doesn't. But this is a nice part.
I play disturbed people a lot, but always with a bit of distance or tongue-in-cheek. Most of the villains I play are essentially harmless.
I'm in a place in my life where I get offered parts that I didn't get offered before - fathers and uncles and grandfathers and so on. And it took me a long time to get to that place, but I'm glad because it opens up new territory.
When videotape came so a lot of movies that I do have a kind of afterlife in video. Things where movies that I do would come and go; they still come and go but you can go rent them and see them on TV.
I think early on I knew what I was going to do and it was based a lot on familiarity but it was also because I didn't have a lot of skills. There was nothing I wanted t be. I didn't want to be a doctor. I wanted to be in show business.
I think if you do something effectively whether you're the lover or the comic or the action guy or the villain like I play; movies are very expensive to make. Chances are you'll get asked to play that part again.
I think that a good movie creates its own world, and that world needn't refer to anything that's real. If it's consistent, if it's entertaining, if it's interesting, it justifies its being there.
Somebody said to me that I speak English almost like somebody for whom English is not their first language.
Is typecasting really a problem?
I have been in movies that I thought I wasn't very good in.
I became an actor by accident.
