Quotes

"I just pick the best roles that are left over, and they usually aren't the heterosexual, leading-man, non-drug-addict parts. And once you get into doing them, people know you do them." - On his wide range of offbeat parts.

If you go in and audition for roles rather than just be offered them, then you kind of get a chance to kind of discover that you can do something that you didn't think you could do.

When you don't have power, which I still don't in the grand Hollywood scheme of things, you get offered things that you wouldn't ordinarily be offered. Frequently, other people know what I can do more than I do.

On his role as a marine in Jarhead (2005): There's a quality my character has about not caving in to the physical or mental demands of your job. I really took that to heart. A lot of my relatives have served, and I have respect for what it means to be a soldier. These guys are carrying a very heavy burden. We joke about marines being strict and severe, but would you want a bunch of hippies running around with guns?.

When people say, 'The movie sucked, but you didn't'; that means you didn't swing hard enough. You bunted. If the movie goes down, I want to go down with it.

Seriously, in Catholicism, you're supposed to love your enemy. That really impressed me as a kid, and it has helped me as an actor. I don't believe there are bad people. Just people who do bad things. The way that I view the characters I play is part of my religious upbringing. To abandon curiosity in all personalities, good or bad, is to give up hope in humanity. Like somebody who is mumbling on the street - I'm always curious if his words make any sense. I'm interested in lost souls. They possess another sort of secret. (Explaining how his religious upbringing influences his choices as an actor, 2005.)

I'm very much against the death penalty. It's very easy to do a piece about someone who's been railroaded by the system, who's innocent. If you don't believe in the death penalty, you have to take an extreme circumstance - someone who's indefensible - to see if it still applies. Otherwise the death penalty applies in some cases.

[on Sean Penn taking him out to dinner during the making of his first film, Dead Man Walking (1995)] It was a sort of I'm-going-to-rape-you-and-we-should-get-to-know-one-another meal. I thought that was nice, and I've tried to extend the same courtesy to my co-stars, especially if I'm going to kill or rape them.

In my first scene in any movie ever, Sean Penn dragged me out to a swamp, threw me down in the mud, raped and killed me and my girlfriend. We did the scene, we took a shower, put on new clothes and did the scene again. All night long. And that was my big break.

[watching wife Maggie Gyllenhaal kiss onscreen] I once saw an actor kiss my wife in a movie and it drove me crazy because he had his hand in his pocket. I was like, that's my wife and he had his hand in his pocket like he was looking for his keys while he was kissing her? This woman is incredible. Show it!