There comes a point when you've exhausted your opportunities playing good guys. I've been around long enough, I think I'm entitled to explore a bit. But what I saw there was an opportunity to play a character different from what the audience's expectation was. A chance to take their crude experience of me - of my iconography, if you will - and turn it on its ear at an appropriate juncture in the film to be useful to the process of telling the story.

I accrued anger from people's low opinion of me and my work, and for the work I might be capable of.

I was never that much a focus of interest in my career. I'm aware of that now, which doesn't give me a lot of pleasure.

My character is meant to know nothing about rap, and not to like it very much, but I know about it, because my kids make me listen to it. There's some rap I do like very much. I like Eminem, Blackalicious.

I haven't purposefully set out to play heroes. I'm interested in playing the character who finds himself in extraordinary circumstances. But he's really either just saving himself or acting in the service of something that's important to him.

I think people only have so much interest in anybody, and if you barrage them in between the times you have something to offer them you become a personality rather than an actor - much more short-lived. I only work once a year. And that's enough.

It doesn't matter to me whether I go back to outer space or not [while acting]. The job's the same and I don't have any sort of genre preferences. I'm looking for a good story and a good character, whether earthbound or not.