If you speak in a different accent, you begin to move in a slightly different way. You think in a slightly different way. It's part of trying to find what makes a character.

I think it would be self-indulgent to go, "Oh, I'm going to make this character different by giving him a quirk of some kind." I don't think that serves the story, particularly. But even very similar scenes with a different set of actors, a different set of circumstances, it starts to evolve as a different character.

Twitter! It's like being stalked by committee!

It's very hard to be objective about something you're in, especially when you set it up against things that you experienced as a child.

An accent has to do with the way your mouth works and the sounds that come out of your head, but somehow it informs everything about you.

I mean, you know, while I'm acting on stage I'm ranking quite high, but in a room with Barack Obama I'm probably into negative digits. I never feel very famous.

When you're playing a real person there's a balance between playing the person in the script and playing the person as he was in life. You have to be respectful and true to who that person was, but at the same time tell the story in the film.