Unless you look like Brad Pitt, it's really hard to have full control of your character.
It's like why people read scary books or go see scary movies. Because it creates a distance. They're scared, but they're not going to get hurt.
It's pretty simple, pretty obvious: that people's first impressions of people are really a big mistake.
Acting is not a mystery. There's nothing that I know that other actors don't know. We all act, we're all actors, we all know the same thing. The only thing that separates us is experience.
This haunting idea of becoming a celebrity doesn't settle well with me at all.
The more you are known, the more difficult it is to hide behind characters.
When I was younger I used to pick things just to face the fear.
And then, as the years went on, I just kept moving along, busting into doors and getting roles, until I started to actually believe that what these other people were saying was true.
I've never tried to be something I'm not.
Then I did Mystic Pizza, just to do something I wasn't fat in.
I think that being a producer is business and being an actor is art.
If you try to go beyond your interests just for the sake of pretensions or wealth, your art becomes less legitimate.
The minute you start feeling like you've got it down, you know what you're doing, you're dead in the water.
People who are extremely inside their head, like he was, are caught in a neurosis that goes round and round. Then something will hook them and take them to their end and they can't control it.
The search for the truth is not for the faint-hearted.
So, it's always different. Some stuff, you want to do because it's a part that you've never played. It's always for story. Sometimes there's a story that you really dig, but there's no part that you're interested in. Sometimes you read a story and you say, "I could do that. I've never done that before. I could do play that part.
They [Marvel] don't tell you. You never know with them. They have their world, but they don't like to spoil anything, so nobody knows until it's set in stone. You don't know. I actually don't know what they have in store for Wilson Fisk, or my Wilson Fisk, I should say.
Im a character actor, and I made a choice when I was young, after Mystic Pizza, not to go for the mainstream stuff, and to do a more eclectic kind of route.
Everybody's motivation comes from the core of who they are.
All of us are trying to achieve 100 percent in our work. That's all we struggle to do. We never do, but we never stop trying until the day we die. It's that struggle to achieve 100 percent, that's where our performance lies, that's what the audience gets. They get the struggle.
So I moved to Europe and only came back when directors like Robert Altman would call me after they'd seen my work in Full Metal Jacket.
To me the definition of true masculinity - and femininity, too - is being able to lay in your own skin comfortably.
My partner Dan Ireland wants me to direct, and I read a lot of scripts - some good enough that I could see myself. But then it's like, so what? Who cares? Let someone else direct it.
When you're a child you're able to assimilate so easily into any situation. You even start talking like the people you're around. I wasn't conscious that I was so good at that until I started to truly feel like an actor.
Look, all you can do when you find your niche is go with it.
