Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I went to meet Joe Johnston, the director, and he's charming. I've been very lucky. Most of the directors I've worked with are charming. But Joe's a particularly charming man, and he showed me lots of designs and, rather memorably, welcomed me to the Marvel Universe.
I was a fan of Hitchcock, but more importantly than that, he is such an inscrutable man, and a very carefully inscrutable man. He apparently was blank-faced with a calm and controlled presence. I was immediately anxious and thought, 'How am I going to get behind that?'
I studied Hitchcock a little bit at University and knew the famous story about the Birds - that he'd tortured Tippi for a day using real birds. I had no idea that it was a five-day onslaught and that it was the tip of an iceberg that carried on through to another film.
I still don't feel I know Hitchcock at all. I find that the more one looks, the more elusive he becomes. But my admiration for Hitchcock the filmmaker remains undiminished. He is a giant of the cinema and the darkness in him informs his cinematic language. You can't separate one from the other.
I heard about the project over a year before we began. My American agent said, 'Oh, you might want to read 'In Cold Blood' because they're talking about you for Capote, but the script's with Johnny Depp and Sean Penn at the moment.' So, these things take their time to dribble down the food chain.
Four hours of prosthetics every morning, the jowls and the nose, and it was very hot so they're having to attend to it all day, and you're still petrified of so many things, such as, can I speak properly? Hitchcock never quite lost those East End vowels, even though he had the softened California consonants.
Hitchcock's got a very interesting voice; it's a very controlled, measured rhythm that's quite slow and, in that sense, also felt quite controlling in its pace. He retained something from his childhood, that London sound, as well as adopting some of the L.A. sounds... All of this helps you create the character.
I'm very fortunate that I get asked to do very different kinds of roles and I realize how much I enjoy that. I enjoy the challenge of transformation. There are actors who play one character, or a certain kind of character, the whole of their lives. I really relish the opportunity to have the challenge to totally transform.
It's Toby Jones playing Alfred Hitchcock, not Alfred Hitchcock. We all felt that his silhouette was crucial, so his nose and lips were crucial as well. We had to build it out a bit to get the silhouette. But, with my nose being so small within the proportion of my face, the first nose was too big. I felt like a nose on parade.
Hitchcock is a big ask. I am playing someone significantly older than me and someone significantly bigger than me. The stuff I find very interesting is why certain physical things have come about. How can he be light on his feet when he is so big? How can his weight vary so much? Where does this rather beautiful voice come from?
When you're training as an actor, a lot of the big work you're learning is to treat fictional characters like real people. You don't have the problem of discovering a backstory with real people, but there's always a mystery which is common to both fictional and factual characters. They are never quite the person you think they are.
We're interested by public personas and private personas, otherwise we wouldn't put on with actors rambling on with the same kind of stuff, over and over again, saying variations of the same thing. I'm always amazed by how fascinated people still are by actors because it's the same version of events that actors describe, all the time.
When I told people I was going to be doing the movie and the voice of Dobby, they were kind of awestruck, the people who knew about Harry Potter. I felt rather guilty that I didn't really understand the scale of the job I was about to take on. Now, I am well aware of what I'm doing, and actually, it feels a very serious acting responsibility.
Best ever was filming in Barcelona last year, and I had a couple of scenes with De Niro. He's a very shy man. Speaks so quietly that people tend to bend down and adopt the same tone, almost the same voice, whenever they talk to him - watching, you'd think someone's offering to carry out a hit for him when they're just offering him a cup of coffee.