We'd all like to believe that perhaps people could stop killing each other.
When she was younger, my mother was quite committed to Roman Catholicism. But she got disillusioned with it and moved closer to something like Buddhist beliefs near the end of her life.
You're meant to be playing the distillation of evil, which can be anything.
As an actor, there's a bit of you that's decided you want to be looked at and watched, but there's a paradoxical bit that wants to run away.
So much of movie acting is in the lighting. And in loving your characters. I try to know them, and with that intimacy comes love. And now, I love Voldemort.
And although I've been very fortunate in the film work that's come my way, I need to get back to the stage. If I'm away for a maximum of two years, I feel something's wrong.
Being an actor means asking people to look at you. I guess I accept that. But it's a profession in which the job is to show another world and other people. You may access it through bits of yourself, and your imagination and experience, but actually, in the end, you're not playing yourself.
When theater becomes a soothing middle-class thing, when it's packaged as the Night Out, then that's the death of it.
If I had a gun to my head and I had to choose between theater and film I'd choose theater.
Actors use who they are to be someone else, but I would hate to ever think I'm playing myself. It's imagining being someone else that is the key motivating thing for me. So when people want to know about me, it makes me a bit unnerved.
He's really sort of the devil. He's completely emotionally detached. He has no empathy. You find that in psychopaths. It's about power with Voldemort. It's an aphrodisiac for him. Power makes him feel alive.
The tensions between authority and the people need to be heard, especially when they are suffering and they can't eat.
What moves me in art is how we question who we are as people.
There is a humanitarian impulse that one aspires to and there are days when one doesn't do it very well.
You dread that there will be real problems during filming.
I think Shakespeare is like a dialect. If I heard a broad Scots accent, I'd probably struggle at first but then I'd start to look for words I recognise and I'd get the gist. I think Shakespeare is like that.
I've never felt fallow in the sense that there's been no work.
I don't feel I'm playing villains all the time.
