You can play older than yourself. You can play younger than yourself up to a point, and then that just becomes impossible because you carry a weight with you that you can’t shift, unless you have very boyish looks.
On set I keep myself to myself; I’d rather the director speak up. I’m not gonna direct a younger actor. I think the power of example works best, actually.
Growing up in a particular neighborhood, growing up in a working-class family, not having much money, all of those things fire you and can give you an edge, can give you an anger.
If one could have a wish, or an alternative life, I would’ve liked to have been John Lennon.
I’m rarely asked to play the smartest man in the room.
I like a cheese and pickle. Nice cheese and pickle on a real old-fashioned bread. Ploughman’s lunch.
I never told my father I loved him before he died, and I have a lot of issues about that. They’re all swimming around in my head, in my heart, unresolved, and in a way it felt fitting to dedicate the film to him.
I was brought up by my mother and my two sisters, although they’re older than me and fled the nest very young, so I was technically raised as an only child, but I was very much loved.
I’m still a member of the Empire! Although I sometimes feel like an American with a British accent – you get contaminated after so long.
I’m not the best audience for that because I’m not a great science-fiction fan. I just never got off on space ships and space costumes, things like that.
When you play a character that is so emotionally closed there are times when you ask yourself if you are doing enough and if it’s reading. That is where you have a director, who is the barometer of what you are doing.
Political correctness has become a straightjacket.
The great thing about Google is that you type in neuro-surgery and somehow you end up with Peter Sellers or watching Frank Sinatra. Google is a great resource.
The great thing about having been in a lot of make-up, and stuff like that, is that when you’re working with someone who’s in it, and you’ve been there and done it, but you’re not in it anymore, you feel so good.
I was quiet, a loner. I was one of those children where, if you put me in a room and gave me some crayons and a pencils, you wouldn’t hear from me for nine straight hours. And I was always drawing racing cars and rockets and spaceships and planes, things that were very fast that would take me away.
What other people think of me is none of my business.
At 23 it was all about acting. Today it’s getting my kids to school, making sure that they’ve done their homework. I’m in my fifties, and I’m turning into a square.
Wanting to be a good actor is not good enough. You must want to be a great actor. You just have to have that.
I think filmmaking should be a wonderfully free collaborative process, and it so very rarely is. I often see directors as jailers of my talent.
I don’t see a great difference between someone sending a robot or a drone to bomb people and controlling it on a PlayStation from another country. It’s thousands of miles away as opposed to someone in an airplane who is thousands of feet away releasing a bomb.
If you constantly pander to the wishes of others, you will never accomplish a thing.