He’s really sort of the devil. He’s completely emotionally detached. He has no empathy. You find that in psychopaths. It’s about power with Voldemort. It’s an aphrodisiac for him. Power makes him feel alive.
I don’t feel particularly comfortable about actors using whatever power they may have to push their beliefs, unless they’re extremely well informed.
It’s great to be on a set where there’s time and there’s focus and there’s also a kind of adrenaline thrill on a set where people are saying: “We have to get this shot, we’ve have to go, we’ve got to move on!”
I don’t feel I’m playing villains all the time.
I was grateful to have two weeks to shoot this one scene in Harry Potter. It’s a big, big scene, but they have to deliver. And they have high expectations.
When she was younger, my mother was quite committed to Roman Catholicism. But she got disillusioned with it and moved closer to something like Buddhist beliefs near the end of her life.
I don’t plan a career. That doesn’t work for me. I just have to go with my gut.
Voldemort? That might be real.
Success is all about being able to extend love to people. The people I consider successful are so because of how they handle their responsibilities to other people, how they approach the future, people who have a full sense of the value of their life and what they want to do with it.
In the best material, you always should be able to somehow make a case for a story to be transposed to any other time.
Kenya doesn’t have much of an infrastructure for hosting a film of this scale. Our producer decided that for the film to really work it had to be in Kenya.
I learned a lot about acting – watching not just myself but other actors and learning how to distinguish between two great takes. It’s also about one’s own taste in performance.
I think Shakespeare is like a dialect. If I heard a broad Scots accent, I’d probably struggle at first but then I’d start to look for words I recognise and I’d get the gist. I think Shakespeare is like that.
I’ve never felt fallow in the sense that there’s been no work.
What moves me in art is how we question who we are as people.
I’m more relaxed about how the editing process will create a performance and that, in a way, gives me a sense of freedom.
When I first filmed things, they were always slightly awkward.
In Shakespeare, keep it simple. Don’t over-inflect. The speech needs to be naturalistic and simple and accessible as much as possible.
You’re meant to be playing the distillation of evil, which can be anything.
Actors use who they are to be someone else, but I would hate to ever think I’m playing myself. It’s imagining being someone else that is the key motivating thing for me. So when people want to know about me, it makes me a bit unnerved.