When people are taking something extremely seriously, that's the time to take out the pig's bladder.
I don't deal with the nuts and bolts of life.
I auditioned for soap operas and commercials; I remember auditioning for Lays potato chips. It was a sort of 'Mutiny on the Bounty' sketch, where Captain Bligh was torturing the crew by saying, 'You can only have one Lays potato chip,' and they all rise up.
I grew up with this crazy upbringing of living many places and always being the new kid in town, not like a service brat where you're always going to school with other new kids in town. I was constantly arriving in small towns and going to school with kids who'd been together since they were in kindergarten.
Look at the darkest hit musicals - Cabaret, West Side Story, Carousel - they are exuberant experiences. They send you out of the theater filled with music.
Good acting is really excellent carpentry.
When I was a teenager, I remember the extraordinary feeling of accomplishment for completing 'Vanity Fair.' I don't think it was even for school.
Take care, be kind, be considerate of other people and other species, and be loving.
We all have our secrets, and we all have our deceptions. Acting, at its best, is all about deceiving people, and this makes it all the more interesting to us.
Powerful people are always in charge. You have to acknowledge that and deal with it as a reality. They're not devils. They're not monsters. They're human beings, like us, that have their share of insecurities and fears. You have to contemplate that as you go through life.
I actually was very proud of 'Dexter' and had a wonderful time doing it, which must make me an extremely weird person.
The way I approach acting when there's a real life character, it's sort of like a Venn diagram. What I come up with is some amalgam of the two of us.
I'm a very slow and ponderous reader, but I'm dogged.
I look around, and 50 percent of the big-budget entertainment you are seeing these days is dystopian. This is the era of 'Hunger Games' and blasted landscapes and 'The Walking Dead.'
My eagerness to please sometimes gets the better of me.
If I don't enjoy it, there's something seriously wrong. There's a reason why they call it playing, what we do. It's ecstatic fun, and I overdo it - I mean, I can't seem to stop - people ask me to act, and I say yes.
Britain has a great sense of its own national pride. It's like the monarchy is the embodiment of that pride.
As an actor ages north of 60, he tends to be in more father roles than anything else. It's generational. And it tends to be a relationship that fascinates people, the flawed relationships between parents and kids.
Up there with my awards, I have a great big statue of Groucho Marx, just to put everything in perspective.
People have expectations from you - and the whole fun of acting is taking expectations and completely upending them. That's how you get laughs in comedy, and that's how you scare the daylights out of people in a horror film.
