I love playing half squid/half crab guy because you can get away with a level of acting that if you tried it anywhere else they’d arrest you for crimes against acting.
In one way, an attempt to reproduce the way people actually speak, but it’s not just an attempt at naturalism. It’s stylised and it’s heightened, to great effect. It’s elegant and it’s funny and that’s the way to my heart, frankly.
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.
You tell yourself that you’re not auditioning but of course you work like crazy, and you prepare like mad. And you think, “Well, I won’t get that job. But maybe they’ll have another job sometime, and they’ll remember that I was good.”
I really have no interest in delivering the iambic pentameter, I just want to kill myself. I don’t mind other people doing it. I say that, but really I don’t want to watch other people doing it. I get embarrassed.
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.’
