I had heard that Tom [Cruise] was the same way, that he is incredibly dedicated. I was very excited to meet him and I was, honest to God, weirdly surprised that the guy makes me look lazy. I think he does think I'm a hard worker, but he makes me look like I'm doing nothing. The guy is at the gym before anybody in the morning.

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.

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 read as many books about the psychology of a psychopath as I could and I researched what exactly happens to soldiers.

I only had a three-week break from the beginning of Bent, so I went from one thing to the next. I got back [from shooting Jack Reacher] and there was a sense of, "Oh my God, what do I do now?" I don't have personal trainers around me all the time, I'm not on a meal plan, which I had been on for almost a year straight. There was a lot of sleeping.

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.

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