Quotes

I remember getting cast in Amistad and getting this very strong feeling that I had overshot myself. It was a great shock. It made me realize that this is not a profession you can predict; that you can have all these ambitions and expectations and that they can all be thrown to the wind. What was peculiar about that situation was that my aspirations were so far below what actually happened.

I like to disappear into a role. I equate the success of it with a feeling of being chemically changed.

I always thought of the play as a sequel to Romeo and Juliet. I think Shakespeare's so astute in his understanding of people being vulnerable, you know. And that love is so easy to corrupt. I think so many of Shakespeare's plays are about how fragile love is - how perfect and beautiful it is, but also how terrifying and easy to manipulate it is.

But these are the realities of the artistic idealism and the stock, the commercial/financial realism, and, so, somehow sometimes it is going to work in your favor and sometimes against, and that's all part and parcel of it. We just, in our end, just carry on trying to sort of produce the work, or the best work we can do, and hope that at their end they find a way of getting that to as many people as possible in the cinema medium.

I think I just look for what appeals to me, and maybe what appeals to me is kind of serious sometimes. I like characters and I like story and I sort of like narrative, and that is what excites me. And sometimes, I suppose, in the contemporary context a lot of that is based around dramas these days so I enjoy that and it's what I have always done. I have always been involved in drama, and somehow that is where a lot of the good stories are. And I think there can be comedic moments in drama, like in Kinky Boots, I think there are some funny beats, but the overall, I'm just saying, is that it is a complex story between a few groups of people, and even though the story is heightened and amusing, there are all sorts of beats and machinations that go on and I think that's just what intrigues me and that's what I pursue.

[on 12 Years a Slave (2013)] There are 21 million people in slavery as we sit here. I just hope 150 years from now our ambivalence will not allow another filmmaker to make this film.

[to director Steve McQueen, while accepting the BAFTA male acting trophy, 2014] This is yours. I'm going to keep it - that's the kind of guy I am - but it's yours.