Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I do love pink cocktails.
I really wanted to get out of England.
I keep mementos from everything I've done.
You get ideas from other people all the time.
Male actors have to lie about their ages, too.
Very few movies I've done I regret being involved in.
I've auditioned for normal characters. But I never get cast.
If you're involved in filmmaking, you want to challenge yourself.
Here in England, my becoming an actor was considered unimaginative.
The scariest monsters are human beings and what we will do to each other.
That period of history has always fascinated me - Greek history, Greek mythology.
If you don't look like Rupert Graves or Hugh Grant, they'll have you playing the gardener.
You can't really do a lot of research for being a mass manipulating, murdering super-villain.
A lot of the time, the scripts you get to read are remakes or reboots or sequels or prequels.
I never lost an argument and my parents assumed I would be a lawyer. They cast me in that role.
Moving outside of your comfort zone is one thing I learned from my training as an actor in England.
People are fascinated by evil because it's mysterious and it doesn't seem to have a rational behind it.
I think you always learn something in every character you play onstage, either personally or creatively.
I remember thinking, 'I'll audition just once and if it doesn't work out I'll never think about it ever again.'
I thought if I went somewhere where I didn't know anybody and they didn't know me I could start all over again.
I think at some point every actor has practiced their acceptance speech while they're having a shower. It's fun.
Dad was never a Mr. Mum-type of person who'd stay at home. It was a big thing when he was home - he was a circus.
'Mad Men' is a hard act to follow. Unless you're called Elisabeth Moss, stuff like this only comes along once in your career.
Matt Weiner is an amazing writer. He's one of the best, greatest writers that's ever written for television, or just written.
Matt Weiner is an amazing writer. He's one of the best, greatest writers that's ever written for television - or just written.
In the old patrician world there was a custom once a week you had to eat a meal with your slaves and get to know them as people.
After 'Mad Men,' I got offered various types of uptight Englishmen, which I wasn't interested in doing. I didn't want to repeat myself.
I miss 'Mad Men,' but I can't complain because I got a lot of public awareness from it, and it led on to film offers such as 'Sherlock.'
Pink cocktails look quite friendly. They have an umbrella in them, some sort of fruit... they look innocent, and boy, do they pack a punch.
I've done quite a lot of dying on shows and in movies. To have a good death scene though - come on, it's brilliant. I love a good death scene!
I like challenges. If you're involved, as one is, in filmmaking, you want to challenge yourself. You don't want to repeat what you're done before.
The person you're playing must have feelings, but if he's not able to show them, then just the subtlest rumblings and nuances can say an incredible amount.
Normally death scenes are good, if you have a significant death scene and it means something it's like the audience has an attachment to you being killed that's a good thing.
My father was a Catholic, but my mother wasn't. She had to do that weird deal you do as a Catholic - they deign to sanction your marriage and you have to bring your children up as Catholics.
I was 17, and all I wanted to do was to get away from England and the awful, boring boarding schools I'd been going to there. The last one was taught by monks, and I couldn't wait to get out.
It's important to keep auditioning. If you're auditioning for something, you're auditioning for a role that people can't see you in and you need to convince them that you're the right person.
When you see natural disasters caught on film you realize how well they had been imagined by Hollywood for such a long time. It's all good fun. You never know who's gonna survive and who doesn't.
I met Peter O'Toole for the first time at Dad's memorial service because my Dad didn't hang around with people like that when we were around. We didn't grow up with Richard Burton coming around to tea.
I audition for stuff all the time, and what's weird about it is that one's success rate at auditioning doesn't really change. It's sort of at the same ratio of stuff you audition for to things you land.
It's odd, because 'Mad Men' was the first long-form TV thing I ever did. I'd done loads of independent movies, but after that, it was 'TV actor.' You go, 'When did that happen? Everything else has been erased?'
One of the reasons why good actors are good is that they have poor impulse control. If you put them in front of a camera, they respond as if it was actually happening, in real time, rather than doing it after several takes.
If you want to do your version, go off and write it. You bring your knowledge to it, and you can use that to shape it and color it, but it's someone else's version of that character. You're not actually playing the real person.
When you're acting and you need to cry, you want to put yourself in a position where you're trying not to cry, because that is generally what people try and do. They try to hold on to their emotions, they don't want to lose them.
Often in films there's more of allowing the actors to make the dialogue fit better in their own. Also, you get to a location and the geography is different, so the lines don't line up the right way, so you do have to change stuff.
Marriages had different meanings back then than they do now, they were used to cement agreements between families, business deals and things like that. The idea of marriages being arranged for love is some sort of modern idea, really.
It used to be that you could do these nuggets of a movie and it would attach itself in terms of credibility to your work and the style of work that you did, that people would be interested and curious about you and your work as an actor.
If you only take parts that are offered to you, you end up playing the same roles over and over again. I think it's important to keep auditioning. I think it's important to scare yourself; to take parts that are outside of your comfort zone.
When you're playing someone who drinks a lot, it's not that interesting to play that condition because as soon as you know that, you got all the information you're going to get from it. It's like hitting the same note on the piano over and over again.
I personally am not religious. I think, put into the wrong hands, it's incredibly dangerous. It's the reason for most of the wars that have been fought around the world, and it's pretty ridiculous when you think about what they're actually arguing over.
I keep mementos from everything I've done. I've got my cab driver's license from 'Happiness.' I've got a pair of glasses and a belt buckle from playing John Lennon. I've got a pair of sunglasses from playing Andy Warhol... It's all in a box in the garage.