So I try not to do press and if you can keep the balance of keeping a certain degree of anonymity and do interesting work then you can hope for a degree of career longevity.
Good roles are hard to come by, and whether they're a few lines or a lead, you snap 'em up when they come along.
I realise few people get to live the life they always wanted, but I'm so neurotic, I don't really think about it. I'm too busy thinking, 'I hope I don't screw up my next scene.'
I was playing pretty boys and these angelic roles like Nicholas Nickleby and all that stuff. And I was like, 'What am I doing? This isn't who I am, as a man or an artist.' I had to overcome people's belief that I was too pretty to be a badass.
I always think that the ability to fight and defend oneself is a skill that every man should have but endeavour never to use, you know?
In particular, the film 'Excalibur' was definitely one of those films that was instrumental in me realizing that I wanted to become an actor.
I always think it's better to take a smaller role in a great film rather than a leading role in something that you don't have complete faith in.
Right before I got 'Sons of Anarchy,' I actually quit acting for 18 months and didn't read a single script, and I wrote a film. I felt like I needed to do something that I had control over, as an artist, and also just do something where I felt like I had some control over my life, as just a human, out in the world.
There are definitely worse people to be compared with. I think Brad Pitt makes interesting decisions.
You go through this business and you meet people that you bond with, and you get to go make movies with them. It's wonderful. What I've always dreamt of, in my career, is to have a brotherhood of collaborators, and go in and out of working with them. I'm just starting to get that, and it's really lovely.
If I'd seen a grown man beating a crippled boy, of course I'd intervene. If my father died and left my mother destitute, it's your instinct to take care of her. So when I started to think about it in those terms, it started to make sense to me.
When I was a kid, probably 16 or 17, I got spotted by a model scout that wanted to represent me, and they sent me one modeling job, for Wall's ice cream. I did one job for them, and then a catwalk shoot for Kangol caps, and decided modeling was not for me.
I think world creation and monster creation and all of that stuff is exciting as a secondary element of storytelling. When it becomes more important than storytelling, I get very nervous, and you sort of lose me a little bit.
There's nothing ever monetarily or fame-seeking or any of the other motivations that sometimes go hand-in-hand with this profession. To me, it's just not like that. I'm on a journey of self-discovery and trying to avoid total existential crisis. That's the kind of operating zone that I'm approaching this business from.