I’m hardly digging trenches for a living. I’m getting to tap into my boyhood fantasies of being a larger-than-life character.
I’m really good at judging and observing other people, but not myself.
The first video I ever watched was on a Beta system because everyone thought Beta was the way but then it ended up being video so we backed the wrong horse.
The tricky thing becomes: Do you know yourself well enough to then portray that on screen? And for me, I find that really hard. I’d rather hide behind accents and funny walks.
The sum total of all my stop-starts have made me less concerned about the future. I’m just aware now that I’ll always land on my feet somehow.
I’m not scared of doing movies that are just about entertainment. I’m not scared of doing movies that are really challenging and cover difficult terrain. I just want good experiences and I want to challenge myself and I want to just keep learning, as an actor.
There’s a real sense of fighting and destruction in our DNA that we don’t get in touch with.
The last TV show I binged on was ‘Hannibal’ because it stars two of my friends, Mads Mikkelsen and Hugh Dancy, who I first met filming ‘King Arthur’ back in 2003, and I just lapped this show up; loved it.
To act with a tennis ball and imagine it’s a tentacle, or if you’re in some kind of wilderness film and you go, ‘Okay, we can’t have a grizzly bear here, but imagine when you step over the rock there there’s a grizzly bear.’ I don’t know. They’re tough moments.
Whereas ‘Avatar’ and other movies get shocks out of their three-dimensionality, ‘Gatsby’ is going to be about inviting the audience into this larger-than-life drama, letting them almost be inside the room rather than looking at it through the window. I think it will really work.
Sometimes, the smaller roles in movies can be the most interesting. If you only take the stance that you’ll only play central characters in movies, you’ll find yourself not being able to indulge in that morally grey terrain that makes support characters so rich and interesting.
My brother and I are best friends.
It feels good to be fit and strong.
I’m on the list that I thought I’d never be on. I’m not sitting here thinking, ‘God, I might get this part’ or ‘is it too late for me to play Hamlet?’ It’s really about: who do I get to work with? There’s so many people on that list.
When people are really great at what they do there is no aggression because they are comfortable in their own skin. They know themselves well enough that you don’t have anything to prove.
The biggest difference for me is momentum. On a smaller film you get to shoot sometimes four or five scenes a day and you’ve got to do the tight schedule. I think I really feel the luxuries of a big budget film.
That’s one of the great privileges, being an actor, is that someone pays you and sends you off to learn about something that otherwise you’d never know about.
I have a lot of ideas that I feel are half-formed, or half-way okay.
There’s something nice about making a night of the theater rather than sitting in front of your TV.
I often times find with movies that the heavier the onscreen situation is, the more levity there is off screen. It’s almost out of necessity.
The recipe for any character is always very interesting, as far as what doses of certain qualities you want.