Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I'm not famous for my back story investigations; I'm lucky that I work with good writers and it's usually in the script.
I'm a jacket man. And if I'm without one, I am kind of seriously disabled. I don't know how to operate in shirt sleeves.
Standing in front of a fake mountain with fake snow falling and seven girls dressed as Santarettes will stay in my memory.
It can't be overstated how wonderful it is not to have to audition any more. Any actor will tell you, it's like Christmas.
I used to think that prizes were damaging and divisive, until I got one, and now they seem sort of meaningful and important.
I did actually sit down with a blank sheet of paper once. I think the phone rang and that was the end of my literary career.
When you've been going on about something for a while, it is always satisfying to discover that other people agree with you.
One of the things that is assumed about actors is that they are extrovert, which is almost never the case, in my experience.
The phenomenon of vampires has always appealed to me. Everyone kind of likes a vampire story because it almost could be true.
I am a fan of rehearsal. I like doing it [scene] over and over and over and over until it looks like you never did it before.
Anti-Semitism and Fascism have a long, mysterious, bewildering, poisonous and vile history and it's not exclusive to the Germans.
The way the elderly are treated, and in some cases warehoused and medicated, rather than nurtured and listened to, is distressing.
In the street, people talk to you about all kinds of things, but by far, the most number of people talk to me about Love, Actually.
I don't seem to be able to learn from experience or anything useful. History doesn't help me. Precedents don't inform my experience.
I'm not good at watching myself which I think is perfectly natural. I don't give myself a hard time about it. I am the worst critic.
Jerry Bruckheimer says that he makes films that he would want to see, and it seems that that coincides with what a lot of people want to see.
Actors always talk about taking their work home and I always think: 'What are you on? You just turn it off. You are at work and then you go home.'
If you ask any actor "What single thing would make you really, really happy?" Among the top five things they'd say is not having to audition anymore.
I have never owned a computer. I am one of those weirdos. I've never needed a computer. I'm lucky that I have a job where I'm not required to use one.
I have no memory, any at all, of actually performing the play, no recall in terms of the lines. I can't tell you any line from any play I've ever done.
If you are supposed to be villainous and have some sort of agenda, I like the idea of delivering that kind of character in a perfectly well-mannered way.
A way of describing performances that I admire is that there is an absence of careerism. It's a clumsy way of describing it but it sort of does it for me.
I don't think there's an improvised word in the movie. I hope not because I admire writing. Improvising is kind of gambling. It's just that you're standing up.
When people warned me there would be long periods out of work if I became an actor, I couldn't keep a straight face because that was exactly what I had in mind.
One of the reasons I like a suit is because I've never been that keen on my body. The shape a suit presents is always going to be better than anything I can do.
I've always slightly worried the kids who play football around my house. They know I'm an actor, but felt sorry for me because they'd never seen anything I've done.
The great thing about animation is it's like the radio. I used to do lots of radio when I was a kid, and you get to play parts you would never get to play ordinarily.
I love playing half squid/half crab guy because you can get away with a level of acting that if you tried it anywhere else they'd arrest you for crimes against acting.
I've never been a great enthusiast about how I look and I am very... when I was young I had a real anti-talent for inventing myself as unappealing - craven and unremarkable.
I don't do plays without jokes anymore. I've retired from those plays. I think it's bad manners to invite people to sit in the dark for two and a half hours and not tell them the joke.
I don't normally watch films I'm in because I'm squeamish about that and it takes me quite a long time to recover and I have to go to work. I'm not being coy or cute, but it's just true.
In life, if you have an enthusiasm for what they call 'good manners,' sometimes people don't quite believe you. I've had that once or twice before, where they assume you can't be for real.
I love imaginative representations of a possible near-future, where you look at the technology and you think, "Well, yeah, that could really nearly be true." I like those kinds of backgrounds.
From my point of view, it's very refreshing to play a regular human being and not someone from another dimension. When I say "not act," what I mean is just to be as natural and as normal as possible.
I'm not a World War II buff. I know a little bit about it, I was taught the other side of the story in school, so it was unfamiliar to me, the idea of a German resistance, and yet it was considerable.
I'm not an actor who consciously accesses bits of my life, in order to play parts. Obviously, you don't need to have been a father to play one, otherwise everyone who's been a father would be able to act.
Often in America people would assume that [as an English actor] you've had some sort of deep, classical training, or that you're a Shakespeare enthusiast. I have zero interest in me performing Shakespeare.
I really have no interest in delivering the iambic pentameter, I just want to kill myself. I don't mind other people doing it. I say that, but really I don't want to watch other people doing it. I get embarrassed.
The job is the same - to attempt to make it sound like you've never said it before and as if it's just occurred to you. And that's the same whether you're on camera or whether you're on stage in a room full of people.
Anyone who can do the splits and come back up on the backbeat, as James Brown and Prince can, has my eternal respect. Prince, who is a genius of the highest order, can come back up while singing and playing the guitar.
When you are in something that you're proud of and it's funny and it's a good night out and all of those things, there's nothing quite like it. The rewards are proportionate to the amount of alarm and distress it causes you.
I've worked with Len Wiseman before, on the 'Underworld' series, in which I was a vampire. The first two of those were his first two films. And I admire him beyond measure. I think he's tremendous, as a man and as a director.
One of the great regrets of my life is that I smoked. If I could say anything to anybody starting out in life it would be, 'Whatever you do, don't smoke'. I have had to recover from that and been lucky that I have been able to stop.
You tell yourself that you're not auditioning but of course you work like crazy, and you prepare like mad. And you think, "Well, I won't get that job. But maybe they'll have another job sometime, and they'll remember that I was good."
All actors who have been around for a long time, which I have, and have been skint for long periods, which I have, find it difficult to turn down jobs. If I turn anything down my stomach turns over. I feel sick. It feels like gambling.
One is that you legislate according to natural selection, the other is that you don't. You have compassion, you try and help people. It's a fundamental clash between two people who happen to love each other, which complicates everything.
With stage, you feel completely like you're just in a bubble. I love not being able to see anything. I love coming out and I can't see anything because the lights are so bright and it's pitch black. That's ideal for me, that's when I have the best time.
There is something, yeah, I mean traditionally it's more fun to play bad guys than it is good guys and when you're playing a bad guy, yeah, the fun in it is to see how scary you can be, how horrible you can be. And it's surprising what you come up with.
I quoted David Hare one of his lines the other day to illuminate whatever point we were trying to make in the conversation, and I said 'What play was that?' and he said 'It was your line, you said it about a hundred and fifty times in The Vertical Hour.'
It's more than usually possible that I won't do a play again. But Skylight is one of the great plays in the English language. I was lucky enough to be a part of it at one point in its life, and it's a timely thing to deliver it again in the modern world.