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.

When I did make the decision to focus on acting, I think my mother was just relieved for me that I had finally started to focus.

Well, we all have murderous thoughts throughout the day, if not the week.

Many years ago, I really didn’t know where the next work was coming from.

I’m a little bit perverse, and I just hate doing the thing that’s the most obvious.

I’d always felt very strongly in the power of vocation.

How people are around a director, it really does affect everything, every detail of the life of the movie.

I depleted myself to the point where I had nothing left.

I don’t know what impression you might have of the way I live. I live in a quiet place. I do not live as a hermit, though other people would prefer it if I did.

I like to learn about things.

My main memories of my father are of his illness.

You can never fully put your finger on the reason why you’re suddenly, inexplicably compelled to explore one life as opposed to another.

Where I come from, it was a heresy to say you wanted to be in movies, leave alone American movies.

Periodically over the years I’ve always taken periods of time away from acting.

I had a very vivid, almost hallucinatory moment in which I was engaged in a dialogue with my father.

Shoes are strange things. If you take your shoes off in a situation in which you’re vulnerable, you’ll feel 10 times more vulnerable.

God knows, I haven’t always been successful.

I’m a warrior when it comes to pursuing roles.

I suppose it’s a very highly developed form of denial, but some part of me completely denies that I’m a performer.

I suppose I have a highly developed capacity for self-delusion, so it’s no problem for me to believe that I’m somebody else!

It’s a source of great sadness to me that my father died without having seen me do anything worthwhile. He was constantly having to make excuses for me.

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...

As a member of the audience I don’t like it that I can’t see what’s going on in the eyes and in the face and in the most subtle responses of a performer when I’m...

There are always practical decisions to be made about any character you’re playing.

I have a strange relationship with time. I’m not aware of it passing.

It didn’t occur to me that it was possible to breathe life into Abraham Lincoln.

I broke things to get attention.

There must’ve been some part of me that wanted to make my mark. But there was never a defining moment.

I’m not really a storyteller myself – I tend to get all tangled up when I try and tell stories.

I suppose the place where I live is fairly remote, it would seem remote to some people.

A voice is such a deep, personal reflection of character.

When I do work, I feel the same sort of urgency as I ever did. If I didn’t feel that, I don’t think I would wish to be doing it. I wouldn’t really see the...

I avoid talking about the way I work. But in avoiding it I seem only to have encouraged people to focus their fantasies about me in an ever more fantastical way.

When I’ve gone back to work, it’s always with that sense of inevitability. That may be a complete delusion, but it’s the one that I need to get out of bed and go about my...

For as long as I can remember, the thing that gave me a sense of wonderment and renewal… has always been the work of other actors.

The whole thing of weight, I guess it’s because there is a wider fascination we all have with weight.

I never retreat from films, as it were, I simply indulge in other interests, that’s all.

To people who don’t know me I’m defined by a number of things that people know about me that are entirely untrue.

I’m woefully one-track-minded.

I think some actors thrive on working at a much greater pace than I do.

Perhaps I’m particularly serious, because I’m not unaware of the potential absurdity of what I’m doing.

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.’

I can’t honestly account for the very personal response that I have to one story and not another, a sense of an orbit, the orbit of a world that draws me as my own life...

I’m not picky, quite honestly.

A lot of guys in jail tattoo their hands.

I can’t re-examine work I did in the past with pride.

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...

If people take an interest in you and they think there’s half a chance, they might hang on. It’s dreadful.

I’m not keen on history being tampered with… to any extent.

At some point in your life, if you’re lucky, you get to design the way in which things evolve.