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.

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.

My criteria for doing theater has always been slightly different than my criteria with movies, in that there are a lot of reasons to do films, having to do with location, money, and first and foremost having to do with script and role and director.

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.

Hamlet, that's the only role there is, finally. The only role. After that, you settle down and only do the fun things on stage.

My Hamlet was about as alienated as you can get. Mine was a bitter and lonely prince. Valid, I think, but maybe tough to root for. I think that romance was missing.

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.