When you're acting, everything is there around you, you just have to believe that it's real. When you're standing there with a slightly grey wig on and you have a baby in your arms screaming in your ear, you can go: "Well, I guess this is what it's like!"
I really dont like the idea of people knowing what I am doing. I find telling everybody what you had for breakfast is really uninspiring.
I'm not an outdoors person by instinct or nature. I'm more of a city person.
I've always played music and I've always been in bands and there have been periods in my life where the music has taken a much more front row seat than any acting. For a big period of time the acting work was really a way of raising money to fund my music. And then that all sort of changed around and that's fine.
'Upside Down' is a fantasy love story. It's about love at first sight - when you just fall in love instantly and will battle any obstacle to be with that girl.
I worked as an actor for a few years before anything happened, so I'm used to going up for auditions, and then not getting the role. But sometimes I don't read the book of the film, in case I just totally fall in love with it, and then it just becomes an obsession and you want to do it so much because you've completely fallen in love with the story and the characters. And then, if the part doesn't go your way, it's heartbreaking. So, there's a certain amount of distance you have to keep before you can throw yourself in 100%.
Ive probably written about three albums that no one will ever hear.
British actors come at acting from a slightly different angle. Because a lot of the films are cast out there, they are so used to the angle from which the Americans, and certainly the young guys from LA, are coming at it, that I think it's interesting for them to find these English actors who maybe approach acting from a different place.
[on River Phoenix] I would love to see what kind of choices he would be making now if he was still around, some of the characters that he would have played. I mean, to me he was like a rock star, you know, he had it all: he had the looks, he had a great name, he had an attitude, an energy, an excitement about him. He was instinctively like a, he was a rebel, you know? He was kind of Bob Dylan to me, at times, and he had a lot to say. And I've never seen too many interviews by him, but the ones that I saw were pretty electric, pretty... he was switched on, definitely.
I can play the guitar and the keys and the drums. I'm not brilliant at any of them. I can sing too. Some of my friends are proper musicians but I'm a song-writer. I write songs.
You could pick another two people and you'd have a whole other story and that's why films about love get made and made and made - because there's a million ways to tell it and no two stories are the same.
It’s always interesting to me to tell stories that come from difficult political climates.
The films that I really liked and the ones that really blew my mind when I was younger were independent films. They're like great records to me.
I moved to Manchester to join a band and ended up getting into acting, and I moved back to London to become an actor and ended up joining a band.
Definitely River Phoenix is somebody that I thought, "This guy is very cool." I wanted to be like him when I was a kid.
Most of my friends are from the music scene.
