I never knew my father, and I'd hate to repeat that kind of cycle with my own children, because I'd also want to be there for them no matter what.

The two sports are as different as Ping-Pong and rugby. In boxing, you don’t know what’s going to happen. In wrestling, it’s already prearranged. But the thing I didn’t know about wrestling is that you really get hurt. Because, you know, you’re wrestling in front of a live audience, and you end up doing things like jumps or slams, and 40 percent of the time you don’t land right.

By the end of the shoot [of Wrestler], my trainer was pushing me up three flights of stairs to my house and holding my arm like I was an old cripple. I had three MRIs in the first two months of working on the film. I felt like it really was over by the time we started shooting the movie.

Women are much stronger than men. When a woman says enough is enough, which means enough is enough. Man will always lie at her feet in the hope of return. I was lying. And somehow happy.

Usually if you read a screenplay, no matter who's writing it, the bad guy is always written as a one-dimensional bad guy.

Actors should shut up about politics. They tend to be ill-informed finger-pointers who just cosy up to some flavour of-the-month liberal.

I grew up in a gym in Miami, the one where Muhammad Ali trained. I had 142 amateur fights and lost three.