The last time I did anything like this [special powers] was with the Narnia film with two swords, the same but different.

That whole Deep End experience of finding yourself with the dead body: you know you didn't kill it, but you know if you're found with it, you're gonna be done for it, so you have to get rid of it. And that's a really important nub of Young Adam — Joe knows for absolute certain that if someone comes around the corner, that's it. Nobody's ever going to believe what happened. So that has nothing to do with identity or sexuality, but that is a link. I'm just fascinated by it.

As a performer, I'm constantly fascinated with the idea of being able to know what anybody else's experience is, and how misleading all informatives, like appearance, can be.

I'm a huge Marvel fan and the fact that they take the liberties that they do in filmmaking I think, if anything, that it dignifies the comics and it says, "Yeah. This is a strong enough, robust enough source. We can bend it, it's elastic. It's bouncy."

I think of great masters, like [Alfred] Hitchcock, for example, who works absolutely within this sensational realm. You feel like you can always tell what temperature a room is in a Hitchcock film because the people feel alive, they don't feel like they're just being filmed on a stage.

It's a real comfort zone for me to feel alien.

I was always, and I still am to a certain extent, one of those lazy people who spends a lot of time with Italian friends and yet constantly says I don't speak Italian. Things slow down when I start speaking Italian.