When I do a play, it’s like agreeing to be ill for a couple of months.
I’m not an actor who consciously accesses bits of my life, in order to play parts. Obviously, you don’t need to have been a father to play one, otherwise everyone who’s been a father would be able to act.
You can ruin your life wanting to be an actor.
You get older and you see yourself and say, ‘God, he’s old, who’s that?’
One of the things that is assumed about actors is that they are extrovert, which is almost never the case, in my experience.
There is something, yeah, I mean traditionally it’s more fun to play bad guys than it is good guys and when you’re playing a bad guy, yeah, the fun in it is to see how scary you can be, how horrible you can be. And it’s surprising what you come up with.
Never go anywhere you have to wear brown shoes.
I did actually sit down with a blank sheet of paper once. I think the phone rang and that was the end of my literary career.
I don’t normally watch films I’m in because I’m squeamish about that and it takes me quite a long time to recover and I have to go to work. I’m not being coy or cute, but it’s just true.
From my point of view, it’s very refreshing to play a regular human being and not someone from another dimension. When I say “not act,” what I mean is just to be as natural and as normal as possible.
I have no memory, any at all, of actually performing the play, no recall in terms of the lines. I can’t tell you any line from any play I’ve ever done.
If you ask any actor “What single thing would make you really, really happy?” Among the top five things they’d say is not having to audition anymore.
I do think 3D has seriously improved, since I was a boy. It’s fabulous.
I’m lucky that I get to play a wide variety of parts.
In the street, people talk to you about all kinds of things, but by far, the most number of people talk to me about Love, Actually.
I’m probably the only person who actually remembers pirate radio.
I like American black soul music, that was my first big enthusiasm.
I’m not a World War II buff. I know a little bit about it, I was taught the other side of the story in school, so it was unfamiliar to me, the idea of a German resistance, and yet it was considerable.
Anti-Semitism and Fascism have a long, mysterious, bewildering, poisonous and vile history and it’s not exclusive to the Germans.
You tell yourself that you’re not auditioning but of course you work like crazy, and you prepare like mad. And you think, “Well, I won’t get that job. But maybe they’ll have another job sometime, and they’ll remember that I was good.”
A way of describing performances that I admire is that there is an absence of careerism. It’s a clumsy way of describing it but it sort of does it for me.