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One can never take the cynicism one comes across in life too seriously.
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Clarence Darrow was a unique and courageous man. Several of my favourite actors have played Darrow... Henry Fonda, Orson Welles and Spencer Tracy.
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When the story is good enough, people can watch something three times the length of an opera.
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We're all victims of our own hubris at times.
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I think people love it when anybody acts bad; its not particular to me.
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Whatever mistakes you make this time around, you will live through on your next pass. Every mistake you make, you will live through again and again, forever. So my advice to you is to get it right this time around. Because this time is all you have.
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My job is to interpret. I'm an interpreter. I can add things and bring unique qualities to the role that the writer may not have thought of, but someone else created the fundamental idea.
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If you haven't turned rebel by twenty you've got no heart; if you haven't turned establishment by thirty you've got no brains!
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The story is everything, which means it's our job to tell better stories.
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The audience has spoken. They want stories. They’re dying for them. They’re rooting for us to give the right thing. And they will talk about it, binge on it, carry it with them on the bus and to the hairdresser, force it on their friends, tweet, blog, Facebook, make fan pages, silly GIFs, and god knows what else about it..
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We have learned the lesson that the music industry didn't learn. Give people what they want, when they want it, in the form they want it in, at a reasonable price - and they'll more likely pay for it rather than steal it.
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I can't judge the characters I play, because it's for the audience to do. What I can try to do is to understand and embody what were they going through? How did they make the decisions they made? That to me is a more interesting way to approach something, rather than saying this person is a villain and that person is this and - because it's not very interesting to play that anyway.
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When you know you have 1,000 people sitting on the edge of their seats in silence because of a shift that just happened on stage, there is no better feeling.
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And I certainly won't lay out areas of my life that I think are just private.
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Im attracted to things that are challenging and fun and interesting, and it certainly seems that audiences enjoy them as well.
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I have always believed that the risk takers are eventually rewarded.
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There's something very interesting about the way each individual actor approaches stuff.
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Theatre is organic, film is not. Theatre you come every day and you work with a group of people and you're are all up for it and you all get to do the whole thing every night, be it two hours or three hours. In film you work in two or three minute bits and it's never in chronological order and then someone takes that away and makes it look like it all happened, or that you gave that performance.
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Have we become so celebrity-obsessed that there is no longer a difference between a character and an actor? I hope not.
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I often make the analogy with tennis. Every match the rules are the same, but no game is ever the same. Theatre is like that. Every time is different.
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There are good people in the lobbying industry. Lobbyists can serve a very useful purpose.
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I'm aware that, from the outside, this looks like I've got quite an ego.
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Why not sit around a Beverly Hills pool collecting residual cheques? That is not the kind of life I want.
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Clearly the success of the Netflix model, releasing the entire season of 'House of Cards' at once, proved one thing: The audience wants the control. They want the freedom. If they want to binge as they've been doing on 'House of Cards' and lots of other shows, we should let them binge.