For about a year, I just didn't know what to do. I did laboring jobs, working in the docks, construction sites.
I find it difficult to be in rooms now for long periods of time. I can usually take it for about an hour. Then I stride out.
It didn't occur to me that it was possible to breathe life into Abraham Lincoln.
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.
Where I come from, it was a heresy to say you wanted to be in movies, leave alone American movies.
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.
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.'
If you have a certain wildness of spirit, a cabinet maker's workshop is not the place to express it.
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.
At a certain age it just became apparent to me that this was probably the work that I would have to do.
I like things that make you grit your teeth. I like tucking my chin in and sort of leading into the storm. I like that feeling. I like it a lot.
I come from not just a household but a country where the finesse of language, well-balanced sentence, structure, syntax, these things are driven into us, and my parents, bless them, are great custodians of the English language.
My preference is that, that day when someone sticks a tripod in front of you with a camera on the top, it is not day one.
There must've been some part of me that wanted to make my mark. But there was never a defining moment.
I suppose it's a very highly developed form of denial, but some part of me completely denies that I'm a performer.
I depleted myself to the point where I had nothing left.
One of the great privileges of having grown up in a middle-class literary English household, but having gone to school in the front lines in Southeast London, was that I became half-street-urchin and half-good-boy at home. I knew that dichotomy was possible.
I hate the domestic life.
Making a film, setting it up and getting it cast and getting it together, is not an easy thing.
I live in a landscape, which every single day of my life is enriching.
