I’m not picky, quite honestly.
I hate wasting people’s time.
I come from not just a household but a country where the finesse of language, well-balanced sentence, structure, syntax, these things are driven into us, and my parents, bless them, are great custodians of the English language.
I avoid talking about the way I work. But in avoiding it I seem only to have encouraged people to focus their fantasies about me in an ever more fantastical way.
As a member of the audience I don’t like it that I can’t see what’s going on in the eyes and in the face and in the most subtle responses of a performer when I’m more than a few rows back. I find it very frustrating.
The whole thing of weight, I guess it’s because there is a wider fascination we all have with weight.
Periodically over the years I’ve always taken periods of time away from acting.
I’m not really a storyteller myself – I tend to get all tangled up when I try and tell stories.
I’m a warrior when it comes to pursuing roles.
I would wish for any one of my colleagues to have the experience of working with Martin Scorsese once in their lifetime.
I think some actors thrive on working at a much greater pace than I do.
I’m a little bit perverse, and I just hate doing the thing that’s the most obvious.
I suppose it’s a very highly developed form of denial, but some part of me completely denies that I’m a performer.
I still relate to my father very much. I mean, I talk to him in a certain way, as we do talk to the dead.
I hate the domestic life.
In all fields of creativity you see the result of work that has become habit. Where the creative impulse has become flaccid or has died out altogether, and yet because it is our work and our life we continue to do it.
One of the great privileges of having grown up in a middle-class literary English household, but having gone to school in the front lines in Southeast London, was that I became half-street-urchin and half-good-boy at home. I knew that dichotomy was possible.
Making a film, setting it up and getting it cast and getting it together, is not an easy thing.
If you have a certain wildness of spirit, a cabinet maker’s workshop is not the place to express it.
I find it easier to work when it’s quiet.