I always love being an actor for the simple fact that, whenever you do a job, you have to read a lot of stuff that you've never read before; you explore things, and generally you meet experts in lots of fields, and you get to absorb that information and make it look like you've done it for 20 years.
Beowulf is not a superhero. He has a talent, very much like Clint Eastwood in 'Unforgiven.' He's very good at staying calm in the right moment, but he does bad things. It's very much about having talent in a tight spot.
At drama school, I got a job choreographing and teaching the fights for Mark Rylance doing 'Hamlet' at the Globe in London when I was only 19. They made me fight captain.
You've got something really angsty for me to play? Bring it on. Most of the time, I'm goofing around and doing impressions of people, so that's nice.
I did quite a lot of fencing when I was a kid. I was a swimmer, and I played a lot of basketball. I was a fencer for Great Britain, but I only did that because I watched 'Robin Hood,' 'Star Wars,' 'Highlander' and 'The Three Musketeers,' and I wanted to emulate Richard Harris and the great British actors that I grew up watching.
