Very often there's this misapprehension about actors being people that need to display themselves, to reveal themselves in public.
I feel less often compelled to do the work than I was in the past.
In all fields of creativity you see the result of work that has become habit. Where the creative impulse has become flaccid or has died out altogether, and yet because it is our work and our life we continue to do it.
I'm very often still very much alive for that other being and that other world long after the film is finished
Films exhaust me, they do, and I often want nothing more to do with them, but I'm continually surprised at the resurgence of the impulse to come back and do it all over again.
How can you be a recluse in a house full of children, even if you had the inclination to be, which I don't?
I would wish for any one of my colleagues to have the experience of working with Martin Scorsese once in their lifetime.
I've been very lucky.
My main memories of my father are of his illness.
I suppose it's a very highly developed form of denial, but some part of me completely denies that I'm a performer.
I suppose the place where I live is fairly remote, it would seem remote to some people.
I have a strange relationship with time. I'm not aware of it passing.
I'd always felt very strongly in the power of vocation.
When it comes to parenthood everyone thinks they will be terrible at it. We don't think we have it in us. Then you find out that you do, which truly is a miracle in life.
Ireland was a place for the renewal of hope and I still see it like that.
I find it easier to work when it's quiet.
I depleted myself to the point where I had nothing left.
I'm not sure you learn anything on film sets.
England is obsessed with where you came from, and they are determined to keep you in that place, be it in a drawing room or in the gutter.
One of the great privileges of having grown up in a middle-class literary English household, but having gone to school in the front lines in Southeast London, was that I became half-street-urchin and half-good-boy at home. I knew that dichotomy was possible.
I think some actors thrive on working at a much greater pace than I do.
I don't know what impression you might have of the way I live. I live in a quiet place. I do not live as a hermit, though other people would prefer it if I did.
The whole thing of weight, I guess it's because there is a wider fascination we all have with weight.
It is awesome to feel you are carrying on the family name.
I would like to have children while I've still got the energy. But then I have the feeling that when I have children I'll stop performing in the same way, because you don't really need to perform if you have children.
