Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I like doing things that are very wildly different. I find that the meat and vegetables of being an actor is doing things that are completely different, all the time.
I think the James Bond thing has sailed. But of course I would want to be a Bond villain. They are great parts. I think it's highly unlikely, but one can always dream.
One of the reasons a lot of actors go into the business is that for a short period of time, you get to be other people who you can only fantasize about being, by and large.
We start off wearing frilly shirts and britches and being good guys and the heroes. And then as time goes on, every English actor ends up playing bad guys. That's what we do.
I am not a big fan of what I call 'ambient television,' which just washes through you in a very polite way. I like television that grabs you by the throat and doesn't let go.
A voice and an accent are two very different things. The voice of a man is how he speaks from his heart, right in the middle of him... And then you stick an accent on top of that.
Actors tend to get better with age. You start cutting away the useless stuff and achieving a point of effortlessness and simplicity, which is all you want to do, with any art at all.
I do live a weirdly divided life, because I'm not a Hollywood superstar, I don't live on Malibu Beach, I don't do massive 'OK!' spreads, I don't go to premieres and parties that much.
I don't have much time for real violence at all. I think there are infinitely better ways of changing the world than using violence. Sitting round a table talking is a pretty good start.
I wasn't accepted the first time I tried to get into drama school. I said, 'I'll give this one more shot... and if that doesn't work, I won't bang my head against this painful brick wall.'
To be brutally honest, I am a little bit of a Clint Eastwood nerd. Clint Eastwood who was the man who drew me into movies. When everybody else was watching Star Wars, I was watching Fistful of Dollars.
I do know Joe Lansdale has the most extraordinary voice you've ever heard in your life in terms of an accent that, when I started doing it, they had to go, 'Whoa, we need less.' But that's how he talks.
Airport security is a particular bugbear. At the risk of sounding like a grumpy old man, while I can see that averting terrorism is manifestly important, the measures taken seem, simultaneously, absurd.
We always have relationships in our lives with people we've fallen in love with, who come back into our lives, and we fall in love with them again and go, 'I shouldn't be doing this,' but you can't stop it.
I couldn't do the same job for 30 years. That would make me want to kill myself. Other people do it and they're very happy doing it, but for me, that's not what I want. I like changing things, all the time.
If you're playing Hitler, you don't play Hitler as an asshole. Hitler believed what he was doing was right. Any of those monsters and any serial killer believes in what they're doing. I play it subjectively.
One of the things that makes this so topical right now is that I think there are an awful lot of American men - and women, but I'm a man, so that's what I can talk about - who feel the American dream has let them down.
If you find yourself always playing the villain, or if you find yourself being typecast into a corner where you're not happy then that's probably rather miserable, but if I have been typecast I am quite happy about it.
I've never been "celeb-y" actor. You know, you don't catch me falling out of nightclubs at three o'clock in the morning. Well, very rarely! But I find it all a bit baffling, the whole celeb thing and I don't really get it.
I think I come from a theatrical tradition where, if you look at the great theatrical actors of the British theatre, they took enormous pride in being wildly different from one role to the next. That's the tradition I come from.
Violence is a very ugly thing. Violence is often so casual on film, and made to look so cool and so sexy, but violence is a repulsive, repugnant act that human beings inflict on each other. It shouldn't seem to be cool and sexy, ever really.
As you mature and gain a semblance of wisdom and a sense of what life is all about... this is by no means true of everyone, but a lot of actors like to escape themselves. Inhabiting another person's persona is often a good way of escaping yourself.
I ran into my old friend Michael Kenneth Williams, who I worked with on a show called 'The Philanthropist' for NBC. He was going to be doing this show called 'Hap and Leonard.' He was playing Leonard, and they were looking for somebody to play Hap.
I was fortunate enough to do an HBO show, 'Rome,' in which my arc was built in by historical fact, and over the course of 22 episodes, we were able to tell the stories of these people. We had a beginning and middle and end, and as we went on, you changed every week.
I'm on record saying that HBO is the best television company in the world, and I believe they are. I think they absolutely understand how to make television that is really, really vital and interesting and visceral, and all the things that television really should be.
I think, as an actor, I would find it a little run-of-the-mill doing procedurals where it's the same sort of thing week in and week out. Your character doesn't get to grow very much, which, purely from an actor's point of view, you want to see an arc of your character.
We shot the first season of 'Hap and Leonard' towards the end of the summer in Louisiana, in and around Baton Rouge. If anyone's been to Louisiana or comes from Louisiana, they know what the weather's like down there at that time of year: it's unbearably hot for an Englishman.
If you look around us, there are an awful lot of men out there, and women, but mostly men, who believe that they have got a fast-track path to Heaven, if they do the things that they believe God is telling them to do, and I don't just mean Islamic people. I mean Fundamentalist Christians.
Playing Mark Antony in 'Rome' will always be a favourite of mine because he was such an outrageously big and interesting character to play. Also, the fact that we were able, with that character, to find out and present the public with a biography of that man that had not been really seen before.
Acting is a way to escape who you are for a short period of time. It doesn't happen all the time , but every now and then, the sensation of being 'other' is very profound. You get this moment where you are no longer yourself. You lose consciousness of the crew or the audience... it's a thrilling moment. And even quite spiritual.