We did a lot of that in drama school: intellectualising and maybe justifying your position. ‘I am a thinking actor and I have thought this through’ – well, just do it. I much prefer the doing aspect.
I love to go into a movie and have no idea what’s going to happen in it.
There’s no point thinking, ‘Well, my life’s certainly worked out, I’ve got all the answers.’ It would be wrong for me to say that I don’t get seduced by certain things. That things don’t become tempting.
I could never swim in the ocean after seeing Jaws.
Any good kitchen should be stocked up in oysters, shouldn’t they?
When I was four, I just wanted to drive, I collected toy cars. Where does that sort of thing come from? In hindsight you go, ‘Oh, liked it because of this.’ Maybe it’s just the wheel.
At one point you think, well, it’s funny, I could just be a starving actor. So if somebody were to pull the plug, there’d be no room for complaint.
Sometimes if I stick in a character too much I feel like I might start to get blinkered, because I’m making my decisions too definite.
For me, addiction comes down to basically where a pattern of behaviour has developed and that pattern of behaviour is becoming a very damaging cycle. It’s sort of damaging your relationships, friends or lovers, it’s damaging your own personal health and it’s damaging for you and your workplace.
I’m always interested in trying to investigate different personalities. I want to keep myself guessing and keep the fear element alive, so that I don’t get too comfortable.
I take my work seriously but I can’t take myself too seriously. I’m in such a crazy privileged position.
If there’s friends around, I’ll cook. Or if I have a girlfriend. But on my own I kind of fell out of the habit of it, and it’s a shame really because I know it’s good for me. It’s something quite therapeutic.
There’s so much going on in the world. There’s so much information being thrown at us – so many things are being sold to us, and we’re being told how we should appear and how to be more successful, blah, blah, blah. How does that manifest itself? In the pressures, the stress, this need to escape.
Scratch the surface of what’s socially normal. I suppose in some way all of us have something we display to the public and things we feel too ashamed of or uncomfortable with to reveal to other people.
You know, it’s amazing. I don’t even have a car, would you believe it? I had a motorbike and it got stolen last year. So I’ve got to buy another one of those, I suppose. I can treat myself to that.
I suppose the doctor-patient relationship has that idea of transference. I think it’s a special thing that doctors have. We all find doctors sexy. That’s why there are so many TV shows about doctors.
You want society to accept you; but you can’t even accept yourself.
I guess in the independent market, I’d be getting offers, but in terms of big studio films, I still have to audition. I don’t think my name is that well-known, I don’t have much of a following to guarantee box office success yet.
As an audience member and as an actor I much prefer to find ambiguity.
I think the fact that us as a race still continues to be very tribal and we haven’t really moved away from that over hundreds and hundreds of years of experience...