Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Our job is to make manifest the story, to be it. In a sense, the theatre is such a big star itself, bigger than any Shakespearean actor I could hire, that we should take the opportunity to fill it with voice and verse and movement, not interpretation.
Moments are incredible, but in my fantasy mind I see a Globe company which is renowned throughout the world for what it does with pure storytelling. So that people come and say: it's not just the building, it's the only place you can hear this kind of work.
Well, my wife always says to me, and I think it's true, it's very difficult for us to understand the Elizabethan understanding and enjoyment and perception of form as it is to say... it would be for them to understand computers or going to the moon or something.
There were terrific shows on TV like 'Star Trek' and 'Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea' and 'Wild Wild West.' All us kids would watch them. We would act them out in the basement. I think I found that I could speak a bit more clearly when I was playing with other people.
Shakespeare was the main thing I did in my life from the age of 16 when I first played 'Hamlet' at school. I then did summer stock the next summer and then went to RADA and joined the RSC and ran my own company and then worked at the Globe. That was about 30 years of my life.
I learnt so much wit, really, from the Globe audiences. If you can make a circle, even in a proscenium theater, if you can get a circular energy going, so that all these people are involved with it and present, then there is something curious that happens with the imagination.
It's something I've enjoyed since being a kid, the fantasy of it, the imagining I'm someone other than who I am. I've always felt claustrophobic in one sense of identity. If anything, I've had to work to develop a sense of my own identity. I used to really hate it when people defined me.
I've always looked at famous actors and hope that once they get a part that they have success in, they would reprise it every few years in the way a pop singer will reprise their hits. Like Bob Dylan singing 'Blowin' in the Wind' until he's fed up with it, finding different ways of doing it.
The bad, angry, upset, wounded people are more interesting, so they're in the news more, but I don't think they're in the majority. I have faith that things will change - I mean, just like everybody else, I don't fix my roof until it's actually leaking, but eventually, we all get round to doing it.
I didn't particularly aim to be a Shakespeare actor, but I suppose I had a certain gift or it; I certainly got offered lots of it. I liked Complicite and Shared Experience and Kick Theatre, and all the small theatre companies that were getting going. I wanted to be like that, making original theatre.
I think the idea that life ends when we physically die is as painful as the idea in Cromwell's time that there's some awful purgatory, and you have to give money to the Catholic church to get your loved ones out. I certainly have experienced a lot of evidence that there's a consciousness that isn't physical.
I can't believe, even in 'The Guardian,' people ask the questions, 'Where did ISIS come from?' 'How did this happen?' 'Why do young Muslim women go off to join them?' Maybe because we've been degrading their people since 1917. Maybe their teenage years are a little bit more stressed than that of Christianity.
My understanding is that we are generally a very philanthropic and compassionate people - that when there are disasters in the world, individual citizens send loads of money into appeals for different things. We're a bloody violent people, football fans, and we've been successful at wars, and we sell far too many weapons.
I certainly never pictured myself even attending the Academy Awards, much less winning at 56. I very, very happily settled into a theater career. I did more than that, but I let all of my agents and people go. I said, 'I don't want to be promoted in film anymore. I have enough to do in the theater, so I'm just going to carry on.'
So often, in my life, when you play a joke on another actor, you say, 'Hello? Steven Spielberg? It's for you.' What's it feel like? It's bizarre. He feels like he's a friend. He feels like he's some kid in the neighborhood who has a camera and makes films, now and then, and says, 'Would you come 'round and play?' It doesn't feel grand at all.