I don't care about my personal acting career anymore. I'm done with it. After 10 years of making movies and doing better than I ever could have imagined, I sort of had to ask myself: 'What am I supposed to do with all of this success that I have had?'
I was on a couple of scholarships. I had a job in the school administrative office. I had a job as a hat-check boy in a restaurant. I had another job as an assistant to a casting director. It took a lot to get myself enough money to put myself through Juilliard.
For years, particularly with the advent of the Internet, people have been griping about lessening attention spans.
I might have lived in England for the last several years, but I'm still an American citizen and I have not given up my right to privacy.
I have long been a supporter of The Prince's Trust, and so when American Express asked me to launch 'Amex Be Inspired' and help young people build their confidence and fulfil their potential, I was delighted to get involved.
A British director directed 'American Beauty,' an important film about American life, and it didn't matter. What only mattered was everyone's sensibility.
What hasn't surprised me is that audiences, as we found starting with box sets, want control, to decide how they watch it. Appointment viewing is slowly being put slightly behind.
It takes stamina to get up like an athlete every single night, seven to eight performances a week, 20 weeks in a row. And there are many young performers who only learn their craft in the two minute bits it takes to film a scene. You never learn the arc of storytelling, the arc of a character that way.
If someone can watch an entire season of a TV series in one day, doesn't that show an incredible attention span?
People have really long attention spans, and they love complicated plots. TV series are giving the audience what they want.
For kids growing up now, there's no difference watching 'Avatar' on an iPad or watching YouTube on TV or watching 'Game of Thrones' on their computer. It's all content. It's just story.
People don't tend to hassle me because when I've got a hat on, I look like a banker. I'm just a plain guy.
Why not sit around a Beverly Hills pool collecting residual cheques? That is not the kind of life I want.
It's always the big question in our lives if you have a lot of success. What do you do with it? Buy more houses, buy more cars, buy more stuff, be wealthy and distant and unengaged? Or do you take all that good fortune that has come towards you and spread the love, do something with it?
Clearly the success of the Netflix model, releasing the entire season of 'House of Cards' at once, proved one thing: The audience wants the control. They want the freedom. If they want to binge as they've been doing on 'House of Cards' and lots of other shows, we should let them binge.
I liked it because it was such a dangerous script and showed just what human beings are capable of. Here was a movie in which Morgan Freeman and Brad Pitt, who always win in every movie they ever do, simply don't win. I felt that was outrageous for a commercial movie.
Games are advancing in terms of storytelling and trying to create a character, and it's a brand new audience for me.
I am now a commander of the British Empire.
I'm not going to make general comments about the British press.
Cable TV has become where the best actors, writers and directors have gone to work because they are allowed to do character-driven stories.
