Quotes

I would like to break out of this "dark, brooding" image, cause I'm actually not like that at all. In Ireland, brooding is a term we use for hens. A brooding hen is supposed to lay eggs. Everytime somebody says "He's dark and brooding" I think: "He's about to lay an egg".

The truth is that actors don't really have any control over the end product. To think that you have control is a delusion and it's also incredibly frustrating to be investing that much hope into something that essentially boils down to marketing. So you try to do movies that you feel connected with and you work with directors and actors you admire.

I've always felt that acting is about exposure. You expose yourself in the choices you make. It's when you present yourself as truthfully as you can, in a given situation, that you are being that character. Even though you're being yourself.

Sometimes, the vanity of actors is that we imagine we're so completely different on screen from who we are in real life. When really, all actors play themselves.

American movies to me - and, I mean, I've said this before a million times - are becoming more and more homogeneous because the marketing objective - and marketing now plays such a major role in movies that it almost obliterates everything else - the marketing objective is the lowest common denominator. "You can't put that in; let's put the car chase, let's put the sex scene, let's put the fight in, let's get them back together, they end up happily, they walk off into the sun..." So that there's a formulaic predictability to American movies. That, allied with the cynicism of the way movies are put together - product placement and spin-offs and toys and all kinds of crap that, you know, have nothing to do with the telling of stories - they've turned American movies into McMovies. So that when the movie-goer gets his movie, it's like a hamburger: he doesn't want a piece of aubergine in there; he wants his onion, his tomato, his hamburger and his bun. And he doesn't want the bun hard, he wants it soft. And he wants it in two minutes.

I think the reason certain societies thrive while others don't is the society that is open to new ideas is going to thrive, while the ones that don't, that oppose any outside or opposing cultural influences, those are in trouble, and I think America has done the latter over the past 20 or more years. The worse it is for America, the worse it is for the rest of us.

[on working with Natasha Richardson on Gothic (1986)] It was a privilege for me to work with her in her first film. Her magnetism was incontestable, both as a person and as an actress. When you're working with somebody you see them in a very different light. I just knew she was special.

I did a play by Eugene O'Neill called "A Touch of the Poet" on Broadway a few years ago. I remember looking out into the audience at one point, and the theater was packed with wealthy, white-haired people. After the curtain call I turned to one of the other actors and said 'Theater is dead.' He laughed and said "That's a good one." I said 'No, seriously, theater as we're doing it now is dead. There's no audience. There's no one under 60 out there. They're all white. And they can all afford $300 for a night.

It's the job of the director to be like a great orchestra leader, and bring out the music that the writer wrote, through the instruments, which are the actors.

A lot of people who live in America, and it's not their fault, have a stereotypical view of Ireland. You get a movie like The Quiet Man (1952) and people arrive at Shannon airport and expect to be met by Barry Fitzgerald.

[on dealing with depression] - A single negative thought begins in your head. That single negative thought interacts with another negative thought and becomes a reality. And the world seems like the darkest, bleakest, blackest place that you can possibly be. And it has nothing to do with logic, it has nothing to do with reality.

It's a chemical, and I suppose ultimately becomes a spiritual, imbalance in the body and in the mind. But it feels like the truth. That's what's so insidious about it.

[on being beaten in school, specifically in math class] - I feared being beaten, and I was beaten very regularly. It did affect my sense of myself.

... I didn't feel that I suffered at the time. I just felt it was the way of the world. It took many years to come to terms with and to forgive those incidents that I felt had deeply hurt me.

Unfortunately, I experienced some sexual abuse. It was a known and admitted fact of life amongst us that there was this particular man, and you didn't want to be left in the dressing room with him. There were certain boundaries, sexual boundaries, that were crossed.

I like the level of anonymity I have now. When I was doing In Treatment (2008), it became a nightmare - much more than it had been before that. You have to be very careful with television. I love working but I don't want that kind of attention again.

[on his scene-stealing co-star in Defense of the Realm (1985)]: Never act with children, dogs, or Denholm Elliott.

[on filming The Man in the Iron Mask (1998) with Leonardo DiCaprio] Leo was like a little brother, full of mischief and fun. He would come to my trailer to smoke when his mother was on set because she disapproved of his smoking.

They [Richard Burton and Richard Harris] were wonderful, witty, sometimes melancholy, sometimes angry, but always entertaining. I'd look at Harris especially and think, 'God, the energy it takes to be that person.' It just never stops.

I am by nature an introvert. For a long time I was ashamed of this. As if it were somehow a moral failing.

My seminary life ended after four years. Having been expelled for the crime of smoking in the graveyard, I was dispatched shamefully back to Dublin. A failed priest at fifteen.

I'd believed university would inspire me with a love for knowledge and learning. Instead I felt condescended to, indoctrinated with unquestioned ideas. Theory was valued over experience, the fictitious past superior to the reality of the present. I learned without passion, and I was still an outsider. Still blushing. Desperately shy. And so lonely. I had wanted to join the university drama group but lost my nerve when I was called to audition for a nonspeaking part in an Ionesco play.

People looking at me always made me blush. A girl once said to me, Hey, give us a light off your face for me cigarette, and everyone laughed. I pretended to laugh too.

As a child, I was always fearful, frightened by so many things. The lights of a car shining through the branches of a tree at night, its shadows sweeping across my bedroom, could terrify me. I would lie awake for hours listening for the footsteps of kidnappers and murderers on the stair, until finally worn out I would fall into sleep.

[Going to Hollywood is like] touching a hot stove. I touched it and then I thought: 'Jesus, do I really want this?'

We did the [The Usual Suspects (1995)] lineup scene in a post-lunch, giggly kind of atmosphere. Bryan [Bryan Singer] kept losing his temper with us, coming over all schoolmasterish, and we tried to get serious. But Benicio [Benicio Del Toro] farting broke the tension, as farts tend to do. And fair play to Bryan: he left the camera rolling and kept it all in the film. What works brilliantly about the scene is the camaraderie, the sense of a shared past between the characters.

I was laughing all the time, every day of shooting [The Usual Suspects (1995)]. I used to film my own footage: I'd get about two hours of Spacey [Kevin Spacey] and Kevin Pollak, who played wisecracking Hockney, acting the goat every day. They're brilliant impressionists and would be duelling away, hogging the limelight. Myself and Benicio [Benicio Del Toro] were a little quieter, though Stephen Baldwin, who played McManus and was still in his pre-born-again days, was a rampant eccentric, a hilarious nutjob.

[on going to Hollywood, and being told that, along with an agent, he would need a manager, a lawyer, a business manager and publicist] ...and I would need a little bit of Botox to sort out the lines that were coming in on my forehead. And I was not an old man!

I'd like to be in a serious, loving relationship. You want to be with somebody who doesn't judge you, who brings the best out in you, somebody you can share things with. But I'm not going to commit again until it's absolutely the person. I'd rather be by myself than be with somebody I'm unhappy with.

It [Smilla's Sense of Snow (1997)] was a really difficult movie to do physically, because of the snow and the cold. I got pneumonia, and I was in the unique position of being in a hotel room in Copenhagen with this very attractive young Danish doctor saying to me, "You know, we can't really get an accurate reading of your temperature with the thermometer under your tongue." So I put it under my arm and she said, "Look, I'll go next door and have a smoke, and you..." So I said, "You go next door for a smoke and I stick the thermometer up my own a**, that's really what you're saying? This is what medicine has progressed to?" But she saved me, so it was worth it.

I am the type that likes to tidy hotel rooms. It comes from taking over the housework as the eldest of six, when my father was made redundant and my mother went out to work as a nurse. To this day, I still like cleaning.

[on his spare time activities] Nothing spectacular like hang gliding. I'm not a natural lover of exercise, you know. I do go running, but I always bring a watch with me, so I never run *over* the time. [laughs] I like to read. Maybe that comes from my background. I feel like I constantly have to improve myself. I see myself like a garden, and I always have to be planting things because I don't want the garden to go to weed.

I honestly don't think about it [celebrity] that much, and it doesn't bother me that much, either, but I do find it uncomfortable. I've always been uneasy with it. I don't like all the trappings. I hate red carpets. I hate photographs. I'm not comfortable on chatshows where they ring you up and say: 'Have you got a funny story about this new film you're in?'

I am rumpled, disorganized and have a certain amount of carefully arranged disarray.

I honestly didn't foresee myself going into acting. I was a teacher for nine years, English and Gaelic, walking around with a gown on me and a pile of books under my arm. It was a job with great summer holidays and the prospect of retiring at 50. Back then, I thought, this is my life, and it was a life I didn't mind living at all.

I've already gotten some very good reviews for it [Pictures In My Head], which is enormously gratifying. I'm happy just that it's gone out there. I've been a book-shop addict since I was a boy. I can't pass one without going inside. Sometimes I find myself in there just staring at the books and I think, What am I doing here? I was supposed to be somewhere 20 minutes ago. So it's such a big thrill. I don't know what [critics] will say, and I don't really care, to tell you the truth. I don't know whether it is a memoir, or recollection, or whatever. But the most important thing is that I did it and I finished it. I wasn't sitting around for the next five years talking about it, saying, 'You know, I think I'm going to write a book...'

I was twenty-eight or twenty-nine when I started. I'd done basically everything. I'd worked as a bartender, a plumber, a maid... [You worked as a maid?] Yeah, well, I never quite made it to plumber. I also tried to be a journalist. I had this romantic idea that by learning typing and shorthand you could work on a local paper and work yourself up through the ranks. Then I went back to school, and I studied archaeology and Celtic Studies - Gaelic and Welsh - at University College in Dublin. And I lived in Spain for about two years.

I like to think I'm pretty normal and not given to extremes, but people who know me well would probably think I'm a little strange. It surprises me when they do, but, of course, an eccentric does not know he's eccentric. So, yes, maybe I am a bit strange, but not in the sense that I'm weird.

I used to hate it [watching my own movies]. Now I've come to the conclusion that there's really nothing I can do about the way I look. The first time I saw myself on a big screen, I was depressed for months. The things you notice about yourself magnified 365 times. There was a very famous actress who sat beside me at a screening of her first movie, and she banged the girl who was sitting on her other side and said, "Can I f***ing act, or what?!" That's the kind of confidence one should have. I looked and said, "Jesus Christ Almighty, my nose is enormous!"

I used to have this foreboding about it [mortality] when I was younger, but, funnily enough, that has gone. One of the things I realise as I get older is that part of reconciling oneself to life is the acceptance that we lose everything, we lose parents, we lose friends, we lose jobs, we lose houses. And eventually we get to the stage where we lose ourselves. In the end, we are all losers. You just have to accept that.

[on living in Spain for about two years] I had also studied Spanish, so I was able to get a job as a translator and gave private classes to people who wanted to learn English and didn't mind paying to listen to me for an hour a week. I have always loved Spain - Hemingway and all that - and it just seemed to me to be a place where you could go and have some passionate adventure happen to you.

In the end I was drummed out of the seminary. I was called to the rector's office one day, because myself and this chap from Newcastle used to go to the graveyard every morning and smoke three or four Park Drives - they were kind of like Woodbines, except they were just maybe one grade below. We used to smoke these cigarettes in the graveyard, and one day the prefect came into the room and said, "I smell cigarette smoke in the room - if the culprits don't stand up, the whole class will be..." So we were pointed out as being the culprits, and we were forced to the rector's office.

I have few friends. That also used to mortify me. Aren't you supposed to have huge parties where scores of successful witty people surround you?

I had enormous self-esteem issues, though I didn't know the name of the condition then. I often felt worthless, untalented, fearful of criticism, and suspicious of praise. Yet now strangers were shoveling praise on me and asking for my autograph.

I can be sociable too. But it drains me of energy and I have to find refuge in solitude again.