I think a lot of directors over the years have cast me because they see something of another generation in me: you know, certain people look like they've come from the 19th century. Because I have classical background I suppose that is more suitable to patriarchal roles and easily infuses them.

I buried myself so much in the classics that I felt, "Well now, I've played all the big parts, whether badly or goodly, I don't give a damn, but at least I've played them all. Now, let's start again. Let's start the whole career again." And it makes you feel like you're beginning again, it really does.

How you prepare for a role is entirely your business in my point of view. There is little enough mystery anymore left in the world in the part of our profession, which should be clouded in mystery because it isn't in the public. You don't want the magician to show his tricks or how he did them do you? So I do think that is a very private thing that we actors should protect ourselves from.

If the movie is terrible you can have fun. You can joke about it and have a ball. The movie is already sort of established as a kind of extraordinary piece of work even though it hasn't opened yet to the public. It is harder because you can't go against it and you can't be interesting. You have to go with the flow. Although one is very happy to be in it, it is sort of hard to talk about it. It is hard to talk about successful. It is much easier to talk about failure.

Theater roles are written by the great masters. The greatest literature that you can possibly know are the theater roles like King Lear, Hamlet, and all of those great roles. So all you do is you dive into these unchallenged roles and see how far you can get, what kind of accolades you can get, and how good you can be in them. In movie roles, you can actually improve them by knowing a lot about your own stage technique, which helps a great deal in the cinema and how you can project inner humor even though the particular dialogue is not necessarily funny, but you can infuse it with humor.

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