I'm so envious of certain actors that have that natural facility to hear a cadence and the rhythm of an accent, that it goes into their brain and just comes out. Chameleon voices.
— Geoffrey Rush
With 'Call Me by Your Name,' they locked off the camera and let scenes play out in long, wide shots to make them feel almost voyeuristic.
Some people are very good at being themselves and being very natural on screen or being very sexy or handsome or whatever. I like that, and I aspire towards that, but I don't know if I always make it. I work very hard.
Being in my more senior years now, you hope somewhere along the track that you're going to get to collide with a role that feels very special, and Einstein is such a magnificent figure.
Einstein was very attracted to Mozart. There's a mathematical, classical structure to the music, and I think he identified with that very strongly. I think there also is a connection between being a genius and a polymath.
I live in Australia, and I am Australian, and because I grew up in an era where we didn't have a film industry, and now we do, it's just really exciting for me to be able to say that I work in my own culture in a medium that I find fascinating.
I wouldn't mind meeting some of the people I've attempted to portray from the olden, olden days. They probably would all have really terrible skin and horrible bad breath, and I'd have to give them an Altoid.
I do love perusing the dictionary to find how many words I don't use - words that have specific, sharp, focused meaning. I also love the sound of certain words. I love the sound of the word pom-pom.
Someone told me that there's a connection to Superman, that in an early edition of the Green Lantern comics, Tomar Re was the envoy to Krypton. That was fascinating to me.
I guess I've been fortunate in having an ongoing film career while being based in Melbourne. I'm happy to commute. A day on a plane. Come on. It's easy.
But as my voice coach keeps saying, if we actually spoke the way they imagine the Elizabethan voice might have been, we wouldn't be able to understand it.
I die in almost every film I've been in.
Most films I've worked on have had large casts, but they've been wonderful people. I think the monkey in Pirates of the Caribbean is the most temperamental costar I've had. It would throw tantrums like you wouldn't believe.
Yeah, well, the F-bomb - it's become as ubiquitous as the word 'like.' People just throw the word 'like' around as punctuation. And I think in a lot of everyday speech, the F-bomb has become a kind of dash or a comma.
Yes, anally retentive men are my forte!
This is what happens when you are on the wrong side of 40. Young adults, who could be your children, are now working with you. I was playing their parents or mentor. I started to think: Oh, I am not part of that group any more.
I did not want to put myself on the line, as an Australian playing Britain's greatest comic actor. The fans of Sellers are obsessive, possessive - and aggressive. I did not want to risk their anger - or my own reputation.
I'm in 'Gods of Egypt.' It was CGI on a level that I've never encountered. You're in a blue environment on a mirrored floor because that's going to be looking like Ra the Sun God's boat. In the studio, it was like I was in a Robert Lepage theatrical piece.
As an actor, I'm ambivalent because I'm focused on the other person and what they're giving me, what I need to be giving them, and what the character is thinking.
The hero of the 'Peanuts' is Charlie Brown. I play the dog that sleeps on the top of his dog box who's a philosopher. I'm drawn to that. So I'm drawn to Barbossa as I'm drawn to Einstein, because they are outsiders, and I suppose, as a character actor, that's the turf that you're locked into, in a way.
I dreamt of being an astronomer; I had a series of 'How and Why' books on the planets and the stars. At that stage, there were only 14 galaxies; now there are multiverses, dark matter, the nano-microscopic world of the interior of atomic structure.
I enjoy roles that involve a task outside of my natural capabilities - for example, playing a number of musical instruments or sword fighting or cutting a suit. You have to look as though you can do it, without too much editing.
It's nice going to work and not having to always get on a plane to do it.
My kids started school, so having a strong base in Melbourne has been a key priority. I'm not daunted by the travel. People say, 'It's so far to Australia,' and I say, 'You get on the plane, you eat well, you sleep, you wake up - and you're there.'
I think that Ionesco's greatest weapon is that he's able to make us laugh at the darkest corners of our souls.
I didn't know the Green Lantern comics at all. I was a Superman reader.
I always felt thrilled and amazed that I could put actor on my tax form.
There's four biggies. There was Elizabeth I, George III, Victoria, and the current queen, who really dominated four eras.
I was never a leading man. I've always been in the outer concentric circles in the company, being a character actor, which is a good place to be. It gives you that diversity.
What I appreciated was the fact that the script delved into how Australians were - and still are - condescended to by the English.
People tend to think of Brisbane as a sleepy, sub-topical place. I don't know. It's like Baltimore or something. I don't know. You would hear the family dramas going on behind closed doors.
People are intrigued and fascinated, almost obsessed with the private lives of great public personalities.
I always had a fantasy of being a chef, because I like kitchen life.
When people come to me and tell me I was terrific in this or that, I do not want to fall flat on my face the next time. But, tough, I have fallen flat before. You just get up and dust yourself off.
A huge part of what we do as actors is learning to ignore the camera, as if it's not even there, while simultaneously being very aware of the camera and what it's capturing, because you can give the best performance of your life, but if you do it with the back of your head facing the camera, it's going to get cut from the movie.
I was not the young heroic model for 'Hamlet.' I tended to play those characters that orbited around them: the rogues and the rat bags and the idiots and the fools and the clowns that sway the plot somehow from a tangent.
I don't like the ocean. I'm not a natural swimmer, even though I come from Australia. That' a terrible thing to say.
I'm a very amateur scientist. For me, it started with the Mercury space program and onward to the moon landing in my impressionable adolescent years.
It was nice to play something that felt a little more muted or internalized in 'The Daughter.'
If you're in an Egyptian film and you're not Egyptian, you have to wear mascara and stuff like that.
Sometimes you do feel a script that glows in your hand the moment you start reading it. By page four of Shakespeare in Love, I said, 'I have to be in this movie.'
I like roles that are on the extreme ends of the spectrum, and there's special appeal in exploring these slightly forgotten plays that people might think of as subjects for academic term papers instead of live theater.
I asked, 'What is this guy?' They said, he's part-fish, part-bird, maybe a bit of lizard, and you don't have to go through five hours of makeup to play him. That was good enough for me.
You had to be into sport and, sad to say, I'm a traitor to my country because I don't have a sporting bone in my body.
Nobody ever said that growing old would be easy. Just having to hold the newspaper out in your forties and then hair growing out of unusual parts of your body in your fifties. It's tough on the ego.
They were saying, 'Keep this under your hat, but Jack Sparrow's going to die in the second movie.' I went, 'You're kidding me. The fans are going to go berserk.'
I knew all about Edward VIII's abdication, George VI becoming the king and having a stammer, but nothing about how he got rid of it.
Within our culture, every school has a swimming pool. We lived on the coast. People swam in the surf. It's a very sporty nation and at that particular time anyone who had an artistic bent was very much an outsider. So if you liked reading or ideas or playing the piano then your dad viewed you as a sissy, basically.
My eye muscles hurt now when I read our MasterCard bill.
It's their story, and I got to be the guy in the back while they were in the foreground.
