You deal with failure – strike, strike, strike – all the time. Acting is like that. You have to have a very thick skin in a way – your hair is too dark, you’re too ugly for the part, your audition wasn’t good.
You have to kill to survive. People have been doing it forever. I eat meat, and I eat fish. If I were on a deserted island I would need that to survive.
To be honest with you, I’d rather not be working. When you work, there are all sorts of deadlines and pressures. I like to do one thing and take my time to do the other one.
I’ve had people ask me: ‘How can you make a movie about a murderer? A terrorist?’ What they don’t understand is that I’m in support of everyone who appears on screen. I have to be. I take the position of everyone who’s on screen. I’m not judging them one way or another.
Hopefully, I can play both sides of the fence. That’s probably what winning the Oscar gives me, the chance to do something with a studio and do other things that I really want to do.
I trained as a theatre actor and you had a bare stage and you had to pretend, one prop and you are in the middle of 8th Ave. and traffic is just going by.
I used to play basketball and I was pretty competitive, but I was never a bad loser. I never got angry. For me it was always about doing my best and devoting myself to a challenge.
It’s funny, but when I arrived in California to start college I was much more interested in becoming a surfer and cruise along in life from one beach to the next. I didn’t plan out any huge career for myself.
I’ve played drug dealers, all my life. I’ve made a career of killing people and playing all kinds of killers. The violence and drugs is portrayed in exaggeration. This is fiction. That is how I looked at it. And, sometimes truth is stranger than fiction. Just open a newspaper.
