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.

Psychopaths don't have that charming skill set. They definitely manipulate, but they do it through focused, unskilled means. They're more obsessive.

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 came on to Jack Reacher, I had just taken my girlfriend on vacation and ate everything I could. I put on about 15 pounds, so when I met [the Jack Reacher team] I was clocking in at about 180. They looked at me and were like, "You're just gonna lose five pounds, we're gonna keep you skinny".

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.

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

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