I come from a long line of teachers. Not only did I not go into the family business; I had an aborted law career and I played in bands. ‘Disco Pigs’ was my first professional acting experience.
It was very much about performances, the whole ensemble thing was just great – everybody working together. Sometimes it didn’t feel like a film set. It wasn’t technically driven, it was very, very enjoyable.
I’d love to work in America, some of my favourite films come from America.
I suppose I’ve always been attracted to this sort of outsider in general – in literature, in music, politics, whatever – and to the person that is able to be relentlessly themselves. I don’t think that I have that quality, that strength of mind.
Having started out in theatre, I feel an impulse to do it as much as I can.
At the moment I’m doing this space movie, so I’m obsessed with physics and space travel. I know three months down the line it’s gone. Then I’ll be able to superficially say stuff about space.
I feel very lucky to be making good work still. The confidence of youth, or that sort of competitiveness you get when you’re 22 or 23, the impatience – that’s probably been tempered. Hopefully I’m slightly better company.
It’s always nice to be challenged.
I think every director has a different methodology.
From a very young age I had an ambition to be a musician, and to do that professionally. That’s what I pursued until I was about 20, playing in bands that were taken pretty seriously at that stage.
Every Irish person of my generation and earlier, we were raised Catholic and we’d have to learn it in school, we’d to learn the catechism by rote.
You need to be as clean of a slate as you can be, as an actor. You have to try to be open to every experience.
I’ve had the pleasure and the great luck to work with some incredible actors over the years and you have to observe and learn and take something from it and try and become better yourself.
I never make a distinction between doing a film in Hollywood or doing a film independently. It’s just the story. It’s always the story for me. The constants are that it should challenge me and I shouldn’t repeat myself. And the story should always be a story worth telling.
I like the little bit of distance that London affords me and I like living in a world capital. I like having the culture at my fingertips.
I think audiences are a lot more intelligent than what we give them credit for and understand that an actor is playing a role and that doesn’t mean he can’t play different types of roles.
I’m pretty adamant to do an American accent because you get it immediately.
I don’t care if people perceive me as always selling out because I’m doing a studio picture. For me, the whole thing is you should be diverse in your choices; that’s the beauty of being an actor, you should be able to do that.
I think if you play characters, it’s very important not to ever tag them with any sort of disorder, or diagnose them, or whatever. You have to normalize the behavior to get inside the character.
I don’t consider myself a shy person necessarily, but there’s something about getting under the skin of a character and allowing you an abandon or a sense of courage that you would never have in your own life.
I’m Irish and very proud of being Irish, but as an actor, your extraction should be secondary, really. You should be able to embody whatever character it is, wherever the character comes from. That’s always been important, for me. I’m an actor who’s Irish, not an Irish actor.