I was relatively buff (before 'Avatar'), because I was working in a tanktop half the time on stage, anyway, but I just went kind of into hyperdrive after that and really worked to beat that old body into shape, to get that carcass where...I didn't want to be looking at it and see anything hanging where it shouldn't be hanging.

I've always been curious as to why one man jumps out of a fox-hole with a grenade and charges a machine gun nest and his buddy, who sits right there next to him, sits there cowering. My feeling is that the different is tiny between the two.

I always have a contract with a character. Even when he's unappealing. The contract is to give him his due. To tell his story. And to keep his secrets.

Your primary tools, as an actor, are observation and imagination. You can pretty much get everything you need from that, and you do. It brings back that element of pretend.

When you want to learn about something, what is the first thing you do... you go to the internet.

Theater, because of the commitment, it has to be a great role and a great play to me. It takes a lot out of you.

I don't want to, in any way, characterize a race or a people or get accused of racial profiling, but the Irish, as lyrical and romantic as they can be in their poetry, they can be every bit as repressed in their personal relations.