I attended the bedside of a friend who was dying in a Dublin hospital. She lived her last hours in a public ward with a television blaring out a football match, all but drowning our final conversation.
I would like to break out of this dark, brooding image, cause I'm actually not like that at all.
It was either Voltaire or Charlie Sheen who said, 'We are born alone. We live alone. We die alone. And anything in between that can give us the illusion that we're not, we cling to.'
I had one of the best days of my life. I spent the afternoon with my two kids and my ex-wife at Serendipity. Then I came to the theater, and you know, I think I did the play the best I've ever done it.
When you're still, and some actors are really brilliant at that, you bring a kind of energy to you as opposed to sending the energy out. There are some actors, like Gary Cooper or Kevin Spacey, that are absolutely brilliant - Gene Hackman is another - at being and allowing the audience to just do the work.
O'Neill presents a very complex multi-layered kind of challenge. His characters are always deeply complex and, to a great extent, inaccessible.
I'm not a very gregarious person. I can't bear attention being called to me in a public place, which is ridiculous in a business that pays you to be noticed.
The Catholic Church is an innately conservative rock - they call themselves the 'rock of Peter' - and its resistance to change is, ironically, what has kept it constant throughout the ages.
Not to oversimplify it, somebody once said a good rule of thumb in interpreting a character is to find the good in the bad people that you portray and the bad in the good.
Viking women were able to rule kingdoms, divorce husbands, own land; and Vikings were very progressive in terms of the rights of women.
Generally speaking, I don't think people know a great deal about the Viking culture, apart from the label that is usually attached to them, either pillagers or deviants who came and brought back loot to Norway. It was an incredibly sophisticated, complex and layered culture. They had their own laws, many of which protected women.
I think that if you can convey a kind of a complexity, a mystery, a truth in stillness, that, to me, is really worth striving for, and I totally agree with Michael Fassbender in that less is more. If it's going on inside you, the camera will find it.
What is that song that Willie Nelson sang? 'Oh, the days dwindle down to a precious few.' I think of that. No big deal. I've reached a stage in my life where I am content.
I would love to go back to any time in European history, especially in Irish history, to the second or third century, prior to the arrival of Christianity when Paganism flourished. I can always go back there in my imagination, of course. It doesn't cost anything, and it's a form of time travel, I suppose.
Where issues used to be, say, parochial or local in Ireland or England and so forth, all politics is global now because all business is global.
It's actually pretty complex, because there's two levels of reality in the narrative. One is what really took place, and the other is Spider's poisoned version of what took place.
We tend to think of extremes of emotions as registering, for example, you have to cry or laugh or get angry. But for the most part, we find it difficult to read each other most of the time. If you walk through the street, most people are pretty difficult to read. But they're thinking inside.
No actor who's any good can say truthfully to themselves, 'Yeah, I'm good; I've got this sorted.'
I thought to myself, there's a man who gave up his life to serve others - to touch people in that way is probably the greatest thing you can do as a human being.
