“The most important thing is, whatever you do decide to choose, take it seriously and do your best.”
“I don’t have a general archetypal platonic shadow, ‘acting’ concept about it.”
“It’s not often talked about what a wonderful feeling it is to see someone that you care about love and be loved.”
“I left school early in my last year before I took my A-levels. I wasn’t expelled. It was just a mutual understanding. I wasn’t interested in going to school and they said, ‘You’re not turning up,’ so we severed ties. Both sides appreciated it.”
“Mental health is such a complex thing and so difficult to diagnose. What is a mental problem? Who does have mental problems? What’s the difference between mental problems and depression and sadness?”
“There’s this weird thing about acting where you have to wait for somebody to ask you to do it; like you have to wait for a director to say it’s okay.”
“I don’t think I could do a superhero movie. I’m just not really that type of guy.”
“I write constantly about everything.”
“As children, my siblings and I were actively discouraged from acting. I have no memories of going on set with my parents – aside from ‘Gulliver’s Travels.’”
“I felt that my decisions, whether good or bad, would always be supported by my parents, because I was loved and respected.”
“I’m not afraid of not working.”
“My baby pukes on me. It’s life. It’s very much a normal life.”
“I like to cook and go to Whole Foods.”
“I’ve definitely been obsessed with a couple of girls. They didn’t work out.”
“’American Buffalo’ is special. I can’t wait to fight to make an audience feel about it as I do.”
“I didn’t have any idea what I wanted to be when I grew up.”
“In England, theater auditions are gentler experiences. You sit down with the director and talk about the play.”
“To be an English person in my 20s, doing a Broadway show – it’s one of the mountains I wanted to climb.”
“There are few things that are more revealing about someone than the way that they talk about a piece of literature or a play. You very quickly come to have a much deeper understanding of someone than you would if you just mingled together in a pub saying, ‘All right, how are you?’”
“Even the way Mamet describes silences within his plays is different. There are pauses; there are pauses within parentheses; there are pauses before dialogue; there are pauses in the spaces between the dialogue – there’s this extraordinary vocabulary of silence which is all there on the page, mapped out.”
“I literally do not understand how New Yorkers deal with summer.”
“I’m not a very good actor.”
“I spend the majority of my life not acting.”
“Some people are defined by what they do.”
“’1984′ is terrifyingly relevant. It generates a political conversation, but it’s an exciting piece of theatre. Every day, there are things to be spawned from Orwell’s mind, whether it’s in England or America, terrorist-related or government-related.”
“If a film is being made by an intelligent director, they’re going to cast the right guy.”
“I shouldn’t be right for every role, because I’m not.”
“Basically, I was a very serious film fan. I watched a lot of cinema and contemporary and European film.”
“It’s always dangerous to prescribe an idea on other people.”
“My core group of friends are all from when I was a kid.”
“I don’t have a set way of preparing for something. You just have to take it seriously.”
“If they’re a friend, they stick with you through the tough stuff.”
“I’d go as far as it takes. There’s never too far. You do what you have to do for your girl.”
“I always think that period between the ages of 18 and 24 is such a bizarre stage, and the two people at either end are always very different.”
“The first word that always came into my head with Henry VI was ’empathy.’ He doesn’t have a barrier between what other people feel and what he feels.”
“I found that the more I’d done Shakespeare, and the more I trusted my instincts and applied the same rules you would apply to any scene, the closer I got to how it’s meant to be acted.”
“As a Shakespeare character, if you can persuade someone in a sentence or a speech, you’ve got it right.”
“I wasn’t a child actor. It was just three weeks of my life when I was eight.”
“If I’d been a parent to myself, I would have been scared because I was only ever interested in my own thoughts.”
“I’m drawn to people rather than mediums – directors, writers, actors.”
“My career may look bizarre to some, but I have very strong reasons for doing every single job I’ve done.”
“Scary things are good, aren’t they?”
“The phrase ‘dream career’ sounds pretty stupid.”
“There I am, watching Philip Seymour Hoffman, one of my favourite actors in the world, walk into the room dressed up as Father Christmas, being hilarious, and I’m suddenly thinking, ‘Where am I?’”
“So many things I thought I was doing have fallen apart. Until I’ve finished filming, I don’t believe I have the job.”
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