When I was young I used to have this thing where I wanted to see everything I used to think 'How can I die without seeing every inch of this world?'

Like everything, personal relationships and all that stuff is sort of put on ice while you go off to your location for five or six months. So, do I feel more settled in my life and in my work? Absolutely, yeah.

The challenge for me was not just the prosthetic work and how to move like an older man would move, but more so how to have 50 years of experience in the workplace and talk to a young Robert F. Kennedy as if he was some political upstart that didn't know what the hell he was talking about. That was the big challenge [in the J. Edgar Hoover mоvie].

At first glance, you read something on the page and it can seem one way, and you can have your decisions before you wind up on set about what that set is supposed to mean, but until you're actually there doing them, there's really no way to understand it.

It's interesting in this day and age to do a film about political espionage and wiretapping. I don't think that those types of secrets that J. Edgar Hoover was able to obtain and keep for such a long period of time would be possible in today's world, with the Internet and WikiLeaks.

I'm a big history buff so to walk the streets...the ancient world like that was pretty astounding.

I've been in the business since I was 16, so I've had a 14-year career. I've always had acting in my blood. Doing this, whatever it is, was something I was drawn to since my earliest memories. Ironically, I lived in Hollywood, but never understood that all it took was getting an agent and being persistent.