I don’t think there’s an improvised word in the movie. I hope not because I admire writing. Improvising is kind of gambling. It’s just that you’re standing up.
I love imaginative representations of a possible near-future, where you look at the technology and you think, “Well, yeah, that could really nearly be true.” I like those kinds of backgrounds.
A way of describing performances that I admire is that there is an absence of careerism. It’s a clumsy way of describing it but it sort of does it for me.
I quoted David Hare one of his lines the other day to illuminate whatever point we were trying to make in the conversation, and I said ‘What play was that?’ and he said ‘It was your line, you said it about a hundred and fifty times in The Vertical Hour.’
I’ve always slightly worried the kids who play football around my house. They know I’m an actor, but felt sorry for me because they’d never seen anything I’ve done.
To be serious, the things you really want to relive are things like bedtime with your daughter when she becomes incredibly entertaining ’cause she doesn’t want to go to sleep.
I used to joke that one of the reasons there was a lack of classical work on my CV was because I couldn’t operate in those kinds of trousers. Which is a joke, but it’s actually also true – if I want to appear in public I want to look my best.
I have no memory, any at all, of actually performing the play, no recall in terms of the lines. I can’t tell you any line from any play I’ve ever done.
The job is the same – to attempt to make it sound like you’ve never said it before and as if it’s just occurred to you. And that’s the same whether you’re on camera or whether you’re on stage in a room full of people.
I don’t do plays without jokes anymore. I’ve retired from those plays. I think it’s bad manners to invite people to sit in the dark for two and a half hours and not tell them the joke.
So there are things like projection and filling the room, and not dropping the ends of lines – technical things which are important, but I don’t think they change the way I feel in a scene.
