When you're dealing with killing people and things that are upsetting, that can be a delicate place to occupy yourself for a day.
Somebody doing something effortlessly is a lovely thing to watch.
We start off wearing frilly shirts and britches and being good guys and the heroes. And then as time goes on, every English actor ends up playing bad guys. That's what we do.
Im not a big fan of patterns. I like the unexpected.
One of the great things about being an actor is that you have a completely different challenge every few months.
One of the things that makes this so topical right now is that I think there are an awful lot of American men - and women, but I'm a man, so that's what I can talk about - who feel the American dream has let them down.
I've never been "celeb-y" actor. You know, you don't catch me falling out of nightclubs at three o'clock in the morning. Well, very rarely! But I find it all a bit baffling, the whole celeb thing and I don't really get it.
Actors are their own worst enemies. They quite often will get in their own way, and I have to be encouraged, endlessly, not to get in my own way.
What I went into the acting business for was to have a certain amount of chaos in my life. I don't know what I'm doing next. It's exciting. That's the way I like it.
I think the James Bond thing has sailed. But of course I would want to be a Bond villain. They are great parts. I think it's highly unlikely, but one can always dream.
Ring tones are just irritating, aren't they?
I think the older I get, the less I should be doing.
I don't have much time for real violence at all. I think there are infinitely better ways of changing the world than using violence. Sitting round a table talking is a pretty good start.
You need to be disciplined and you need to try to occupy a zone of acting that is always quite scary because you don't think you're doing anything.
Actors tend to get better with age. You start cutting away the useless stuff and achieving a point of effortlessness and simplicity, which is all you want to do, with any art at all.
I often think that drama helps people feel less lonely about things.
I really do want to just be able to sit in the corner of the pub with my friends... to just be an actor and still go to the supermarket and not get bothered.
One of the things that I discovered in my research is that some serial killers build an ultimate reality around themselves that they believe in, 100%.
I like doing things that are very wildly different. I find that the meat and vegetables of being an actor is doing things that are completely different, all the time.
I think I come from a theatrical tradition where, if you look at the great theatrical actors of the British theatre, they took enormous pride in being wildly different from one role to the next. That's the tradition I come from.
Violence is a very ugly thing. Violence is often so casual on film, and made to look so cool and so sexy, but violence is a repulsive, repugnant act that human beings inflict on each other. It shouldn't seem to be cool and sexy, ever really.
Acting gives me a chance to be people I will never be, in real life. I like changing who I am.
One of the reasons a lot of actors go into the business is that for a short period of time, you get to be other people who you can only fantasize about being, by and large.
I couldn't do the same job for 30 years. That would make me want to kill myself. Other people do it and they're very happy doing it, but for me, that's not what I want. I like changing things, all the time.
If you're playing Hitler, you don't play Hitler as an asshole. Hitler believed what he was doing was right. Any of those monsters and any serial killer believes in what they're doing. I play it subjectively.
