When you're playing the part of a saxophone or a trumpet player, both of which I have done, it would be nice to be able to play like John Coltrane, but you can't. Your job is to do something else. And I'm not sure what it is, but I don't think I'd be acting Niels Bohr any better if I went and studied physics for five years.
— Stephen Rea
I never watch TV. I know I'm missing so much, aren't I? I'm probably not. I can't stand popular TV. I've got too much to do to watch it. I know that sounds pretentious and pompous, but there you are.
I'm not in denial about technology, but my mother used to say when I was a kid, 'Son, you're handless,' because I couldn't fix anything. My ambition is to be a Luddite.
You have to know who you are, if you don't you have nightmares.
That was the beginning of modern acting for me. You don't have to tell a camera everything. It gets bored if you do and wants to look elsewhere.
My kids act all the time and it's exactly what I used to do.
I'm enjoying it, but I still don't know why I'm hooked on acting.
I don't feel ashamed of my wife's political background, and I don't think she should either. I feel that the people who administered the North of Ireland for the last 20 years should be ashamed. There you are.
I am afraid of death, scared by it. I already don't know whether I exist or not. So dying really terrifies me.
Angel was the first Irish feature film. Neil's first movie and my first movie.
I loved movies as a teenager and saw as much American cinema as I could, but I hated the English films of the early '60s and had absolutely no point of identification with them.
If you're playing a lead, you're shaping the movie. When you're playing a supporting role, you've got only a moment to make it count.
I see people with laptops as being enslaved to something they can't live without.
The worst thing for an actor is a director that gets on your nerves and says things that actually confuse you.
People often refer to my career before The Crying Game as something which led up to that point. But I was very fulfilled in what I was doing.
I've never been in a bad play. There might have been bad productions and I might have been bad in them, but I've never been in a play that wasn't interesting or worthwhile doing on some level.
I think great art is always ambiguous and can't be pinned down.
I didn't want to be seen as just a guy on a list. I'm interested in good scripts, scripts that are about something, scripts that move your acting along.
At this moment, when Ireland seems about to break into something new, we thought it was worth looking back at a time when people seemed to have found a way out of the sectarian division of the country.
Acting is way of making yourself exist.
We didn't have a television, so I grew up with books. This isn't to suggest I'm an intellectual, but I do read a lot because part of acting is an exploration of literature.
I'd like to own a movie camera - a proper one, with film, not a digital thing. Celluloid has more character.
You do small movies because the script is good and because you believe in the director. You don't care about the money. And when they disappear, it's a pity.
The Butcher Boy is a very great novel indeed and a very important Irish novel. The ambiguity of that is, he's writing a book about an appalling situation and he does it in a hilarious way.
People ask me to smile for the camera, but somehow it always comes out gloomy.
I've been worked over by the English press because there's an assumption that my politics are identical with my wife's, and for that matter that my wife's politics are identical with her politics of 20 years ago.
I have never been to a brothel. I don't think I could go into one.
I believe some people in this business suffer from fame because they behave in a famous fashion.
At least when you're acting you can be someone. In front of the camera you have to be yourself. And who am I?
