I personally think if something’s not a challenge there’s no point doing it because you’re not gonna learn much.
I’m Irish and very proud of being Irish, but as an actor, your extraction should be secondary, really. You should be able to embody whatever character it is, wherever the character comes from. That’s always been important, for me. I’m an actor who’s Irish, not an Irish actor.
I don’t have a burning passion to live in America per se but I would certainly like to work there.
Every Irish person of my generation and earlier, we were raised Catholic and we’d have to learn it in school, we’d to learn the catechism by rote.
I’m not interested in a good man’s life. I’m interested in contradiction.
I don’t consider myself a shy person necessarily, but there’s something about getting under the skin of a character and allowing you an abandon or a sense of courage that you would never have in your own life.
I don’t care if people perceive me as always selling out because I’m doing a studio picture. For me, the whole thing is you should be diverse in your choices; that’s the beauty of being an actor, you should be able to do that.
You need to be as clean of a slate as you can be, as an actor. You have to try to be open to every experience.
Sociopath is a word that has sort of become shorthand for psychopath and there’s a distinct difference, it’s interesting if you look it up. Sociopath if you look at the medical definition, the profile of a sociopath is that they are supremely intelligent people that are also pathological liars, they have no moral structure and there is one more, they have no compassion or empathy for other people.
I think for me with theater, I need to take a break and then fall in love with it again. And then go do it again.
I’ve never done a film for the money
You do your due diligence, you read as much as you can, and then, ultimately, I find that you discard that and you concentrate on the characters [of ‘Antropoid’] and you can draw on [the research] if you wish, but I think ultimately it’s about bringing as much truth and honesty to the portrayal as possible.
