England is obsessed with where you came from, and they are determined to keep you in that place, be it in a drawing room or in the gutter.
I feel less often compelled to do the work than I was in the past.
When I did make the decision to focus on acting, I think my mother was just relieved for me that I had finally started to focus.
I don’t know what impression you might have of the way I live. I live in a quiet place. I do not live as a hermit, though other people would prefer it if I did.
You don’t merely give over your creativity to making a film – you give over your life! In theatre, by contrast, you live these two rather strange lives simultaneously; you have no option but to confront the mould on last night’s washing-up.
Quite honestly, if I were doing work related to a living being or historical being where there was visual or audio recordings available, I would find that extremely difficult because I don’t know how you would avoid the process of mimicry. And mimicry, to me at any rate, is a very dull prospect.
When I do work, I feel the same sort of urgency as I ever did. If I didn’t feel that, I don’t think I would wish to be doing it. I wouldn’t really see the point.
There’s nothing worse than finding yourself in a situation, a very demanding piece of work, and knowing that you’re not a true ally to the person who’s in charge of all that.
It must be hard interviewing actors.
Acting is about people. Other people. Otherwise, you’re not acting, you’re doing monologues.
I don’t deal at all well with the relative amount of stuff I have to face already.
As actors, we’re all encouraged to feel that each job is the last job. They plant some little electrode in your head at an early stage and you think, ‘Be grateful, be grateful, be grateful.’
The West has always been the epicentre of possibility. One of the ways we forge against mortality is to head west. It’s to do with catching the sun before it slips behind the horizon.
I suppose the place where I live is fairly remote, it would seem remote to some people.
Just stay alive, no matter what occurs! I will find you. No matter how long it takes, no matter how far. I will find you!
God knows, I haven’t always been successful.
I can’t honestly account for the very personal response that I have to one story and not another, a sense of an orbit, the orbit of a world that draws me as my own life recedes.
It didn’t occur to me that it was possible to breathe life into Abraham Lincoln.
I never retreat from films, as it were, I simply indulge in other interests, that’s all.
There must’ve been some part of me that wanted to make my mark. But there was never a defining moment.
The word Amendment itself is an encouraging thing, isn’t it? Because an amendment, it tells of a system of government that allows for the improvement of itself. Just move forward a little bit, one day at a time.