Actor

I learnt so much wit, really, from the Globe audiences. If you can make a circle, even in a proscenium theater, if you can get a circular energy going, so that all these people are involved with it and present, then there is something curious that happens with the imagination.

I have a lot of ideas come to me when I'm working that are different from the plan, and sometimes that can be a little overwhelming and difficult for directors.

A lot of actors, you can't get them to shut up. Instead of listening and watching, they're always telling you something.

You need to gain the confidence that you're doing enough on film. You must resist the temptation to do too much.

You're stealing people's secrets. You convince them to give up their life and imagine the life you've created is real or more interesting. If it's a good play, they'll cry or think private thoughts about their lives or laugh.

I think the idea that life ends when we physically die is as painful as the idea in Cromwell's time that there's some awful purgatory, and you have to give money to the Catholic church to get your loved ones out. I certainly have experienced a lot of evidence that there's a consciousness that isn't physical.

I think, early on, I was very distrustful of authority yet needed a lot of approval from it. I was in that kind of bind. Which is a kind of abuse bind.

So there's a lot of people tied into believing that the traditional response to the authorship question. In terms of actors, some people get very angry about it.

It's difficult for me to say, but I don't think the sex scenes are particularly erotic.

It's something I've enjoyed since being a kid, the fantasy of it, the imagining I'm someone other than who I am. I've always felt claustrophobic in one sense of identity. If anything, I've had to work to develop a sense of my own identity. I used to really hate it when people defined me.

I have a lot of ideas come to me when I'm working that are different from the plan, and sometimes that can be a little overwhelming and difficult for directors.

It's an intuitive exercise to do a Shakespeare play and to go through a Shakespeare play.

Our job is to make manifest the story, to be it. In a sense, the theatre is such a big star itself, bigger than any Shakespearean actor I could hire, that we should take the opportunity to fill it with voice and verse and movement, not interpretation.

There were terrific shows on TV like 'Star Trek' and 'Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea' and 'Wild Wild West.' All us kids would watch them. We would act them out in the basement. I think I found that I could speak a bit more clearly when I was playing with other people.

Moments are incredible, but in my fantasy mind I see a Globe company which is renowned throughout the world for what it does with pure storytelling. So that people come and say: it's not just the building, it's the only place you can hear this kind of work.

So often, in my life, when you play a joke on another actor, you say, 'Hello? Steven Spielberg? It's for you.' What's it feel like? It's bizarre. He feels like he's a friend. He feels like he's some kid in the neighborhood who has a camera and makes films, now and then, and says, 'Would you come 'round and play?' It doesn't feel grand at all.

The bad, angry, upset, wounded people are more interesting, so they're in the news more, but I don't think they're in the majority. I have faith that things will change - I mean, just like everybody else, I don't fix my roof until it's actually leaking, but eventually, we all get round to doing it.

As a leader, you get a pat on the back when you make a hard choice.

I have great mood swings, maybe because of playing lots of different characters as I do. I'm like a gymnast whose muscles get too stretched. I've got better at it, but I have a lot of emotional energy.

I think that was very important to Bacon... personally. I think he went to great efforts to get a house for the Stratford man, to make it so difficult for us to prove that it was Francis Bacon, because it is very difficult to prove.