You can hear how hard I work, I think, from these stories I'm telling. I'm incredibly dedicated and I'm sort of known as that to a point that people tease me about it.

I had done a little bit one other time. This character [in Jack Reacher] is a psychopath, but I had been hired by Carlton Cuse and Randall Wallace.

When I did Casual, I just let myself put on weight because he's a schoolteacher. He's not meant to be muscle-y.

I went into very deep research as to what exactly that meant and how sociopaths function psychologically and within the world.

I had just come off of doing a play in Los Angeles which actually got me the role. It was called Bent and it was at the Mark Taper Forum. I was playing a homosexual in 1930 to 1934 Berlin who is eventually put into a concentration camp for the second half of the play. I had lost about 38 pounds for that.

When I look at myself in the mirror, I don't see the bad guy.

You get a role like this in a big action movie [like Jack Reacher] and you can go one of two ways: you can paint in broad strokes, which happens a lot in action films, or you can get very detailed.