“I wish I wouldn’t have tried so hard when I was young. I would have been a better actor. I would have been a better person.”
“…there were times when I just took myself too seriously. You don’t learn anything that way. You can’t grow. If you take yourself too seriously, you’re just a jackass. You know? I look at somebody like Meryl [Streep]. Meryl’s incredibly serious about what she does, and she’s incredible. But she doesn’t take herself too seriously.”
“So much dialogue in movies is completely unnatural. The fewer lines, as far as I’m concerned, the better. Because it’s more interesting to watch. A lot of writers write because they want to explain. They don’t trust the actor. The key is knowing how to modulate your performance depending on the genre of the movie and tone of the character.”
“I don’t want to be the same person all the time,” he says. “That’s the beauty of acting—and it’s also the beauty of what we were talking about. Which is that as you get older you’re educating yourself, you’re learning more and more. And that forces you to use different parts of yourself and to become different people in a way.”