I had the best teacher in the business. Kevin Costner was my teacher. I was acting opposite him and he was directing me. The way he directed me, for which I am eternally grateful, is he would watch the scene back on the monitor, which is sort of considered unfashionable - you're not meant to watch yourself. But he was like, "Come around. Watch this. See there, you're doing a great reaction, but you're doing it out of frame." That was exactly what I needed. I learned how to act on film from him.
I wanted to play a TV detective because it's a rite of passage; I wanted to experience every area of acting. I haven't done comedy or as much Shakespeare as I had intended.
Acting is something that I always wanted, but I never paid attention to the notion that it might actually work out. You have all sorts of ideas about what you want to do - at one stage, I wanted to be a jockey - but this is the one that's a big deal.
I realize that acting is my job, and I have a life outside of my career to help keep me grounded. It is great to have a job you love!
With modelling, you provide an image that is fake; with acting you have to provide an image that's real.
I just went to an acting agency one day and just said, 'I would like to act. Would you take me?' And they took me.
I was always a closet lover of acting. My mom was very practical. She never, ever restricted our dreams, always told us we could do or be anything. Then I said, 'Maybe I want to be an actor.' And she said, 'Maybe not that.'
I enjoyed acting and marveled that one could get paid for doing it.
I love film, and I would love to be a part of something that people universally love as a piece of film. Sure. Of course I would. And I would love to take acting lessons, and see that side of it someday. But I'm a musician.
I'm terrified of being too famous. What I'm really afraid of is that the audiences will go into the theater and not be able to forget that it's me, that fame will stand in the way of my acting. I want to keep being able to change into different shapes and different personalities.
I want to explore more sides of humanity and myself. That's what acting is about.
Acting isn't a sure thing. We're not set to have jobs for the rest of lives, and fame is really fickle.
If you take an economics or a political science course, you're taught that humans are supposed to be rational wealth accumulators, each acting as an individual to maximize his own wealth in the market.
My father was a writer and an acting teacher.
In 1995, I went to Berlin to acting school, which was in East Berlin. And I decided to live in the east, because I thought if I go to West Berlin, I might as well stay in Stuttgart in the West because I know all the signs, and the way we deal with each other, and I wanted to get to know the other part of Germany and how they lived and what their history was and their biography. In that period of time, I learned a lot, and it helped me a lot.
I always wanted to find a way to apply my acting in a big mad monster movie where I was transforming into this scary entity.
I got into film acting because I wanted to be James Dean. We lost him at a very young age - he was only 24 - but I’m 51 going on 52, so there's only so many times you can act like James Dean. I had to find new ways of expressing myself that kept me fascinated with film performance.
For me, acting was a way of taking destructive energy and doing something productive with it, and in that way it was quite a life saver.
Acting is always at the core of my life, but I'm also excited about producing. I'm excited about directing, and I have a life in the filmmaking world, and so I want to explore all aspects of it, not just the acting, but acting is the root.
Acting is like any other art form, in that you have the option to go very big or go very small.
Film acting is one of the only industries where you're criticized for working hard. In any other industry, it's considered a quality and something to behold.
Acting was always a part and faucet of my life. It just comes very natural. I think it's a good thing.
When I [first] went to university, I was doing foreign languages, because I had done them since I was 13 years old. I had done French and German. I picked up Italian, just sort of blasted through the exams, [and then] took off overseas, because I wanted to be an actor. I thought, "I'm just not academic." I'm not very competitive, in terms of acting. But since going back to university, I've realized, I am highly competitive.
A career in acting, it's a learning process.
I find acting tough, but sitting around chatting - that's easy.
