- [describing his role in The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999)] "The chap in the duffle coat jumping up and down in the background!"
- During my childhood, I was surrounded by actors and all I remember is they were fun to be around. That kind of sticks.
- People tell me that Hollywood loves new faces, but I don't know. They're probably just being nice.
- [About how his This Life (1996) character, "Miles Stewart", was received by the public] A lot of drunken women came up to me in pubs telling me I was a bastard. To begin with, I tried to explain that the show wasn't real, but then I found a better tactic was to look them in the eye and say "Yeah, you know what? I am".
- I try not to see acting as anything other than a job. I hate it when I say to people I'm unemployed, and they say "you mean you're resting?" I'm like "No, unemployed", because I am. That's what acting's about - making a living.
- Acting is a cruel enough business. One minute everyone's going "Hey!" and the next they're going "Who?". You certainly don't need people knowing your private business, especially if you want to come out with your head still attached.
- My parents who worked in the business, felt lion-taming was preferable to acting. They said 93 per cent of all actors were out of work, and tried to talk me out of it. But I grew up mixing with Mum and Dad's friends. Adult actors are really childish, and that's nice to be around when you're a kid. So the big reason I wanted to be an actor was I really enjoyed actors' company - which probably makes me about as shallow as a puddle. But it could be worse. I could be working for a living.
- About his costume in Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003): "I came in that day and I saw Johnny in his costume and I was so jealous. He looked so cool, with his bandanna and his hat, and here I am, looking like an ice cream".
- With Miles, I realised that the more I leaned into his essential twatness, the better things would be.
- [on the early days of his career] I knew I wouldn't get some of them [roles in commercials], so my attitude was quite poor. I was banned from commercial castings. Despite the fact you could see in their eyes there was no way you'd get the job, they'd still get you to do the humiliating b**locks the advert required.
- [What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?] Self-loathing that rises to the level of deploring.
- You can take rejection personally but part of surviving in this business is not to. I had a tough time early on going for commercials because I didn't fit either type they look for - the male model or the super geek.
- [2024; If you could bring something extinct back to life, what would you choose?] Civility.
- [What do you most dislike about your appearance?] How long have you got?
- [on himself and Jude Law spending time in L.A. as part of The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999)'s premiere] We just drove about in a hire car, giggling like a couple of idiots from south London. On those occasions it helps to be with somebody you have a cultural kinship with.
- I've said no to work because I didn't like somebody. Partly because I'd had a bad experience with that person in the past. As an actor, we work very, very long hours in extremely close conditions and if someone's poor reputation precedes them, you're like 'Life's too short to spend it with someone who will make my life miserable!' But most people tend to be fairly delightful in show business. It sounds a really 'luvvie' thing to say, but it's true.
- [on the early days of his career] They asked me to writhe around on top of a piano with an invisible woman [as part of a commercial casting], so I asked them to show me. There was stunned silence. I said: 'If you can't show me, I don't know how to do it,' and stroppily left the room. That's the arrogance of youth, though.
- [What was your most embarrassing moment?] I am in a public profession, so take your pick. It's all embarrassing.
- [What is the trait you most deplore in others?] Unkindness.
- [What is your earliest memory?] Hanging upside down on the bannisters. It must have been in Suffolk - there were no bannisters in Ibiza. For the first five years, I was shuttling between those two places in a gloriously 70s hippy kind of way.
- [2000] [What's your greatest talent?] Being able to burp on command.
- [2024; Which living person do you most admire and why?] Anyone who speaks truth to power at the risk of their own safety.
- [What did you want to be when you were growing up?] Not a child, which was short-sighted of me.
- And regarding fictional heroes, there's a character called Owen Meany in John Irving's book 'A Prayer for Owen Meany'. It's such an extraordinary character that he can only really exist on the page and in your imagination, that interface between your brain and John Irving's words.
- I was a confident, outgoing little boy. If you're an only child, you're living in a very linguistically adult world and you've got to keep up. So I did. Maybe I was slightly annoying.
- [2000; when asked what else he has a flair for, aside from "greatest talent" burping on command] The ability to smoke furiously!
- [2024] I think political identity has come to take the place of identity for a lot of people... I'd like to hope if two people could claim to love each other, I mean, really, do you have to give a f*** how they vote in an election?
- So that [traveling with people I love], and the other thing I suppose that excites me is, and I hope it doesn't come off as too pompous, but I'm a big reader, I always have been, and the way the world is now with these f***ing things [points to phone] and the rest of it, the headspace you have to be when you are lost in a book is unlike anything else in the modern world. And when I'm lost in a book and I'm reading beautiful writing, that's about as good as it gets for me.
- Actors sounding off about politics kills me.
- I have always been an avid reader. Although I much prefer the character and feel of a proper book, I travel a lot so my Kindle means I can have plenty of reading material no matter where I am. For me, books are an escape from the ocean of mindless trivia that surrounds us thanks to social media and our obsession with being connected at all times.
- When I'm watching some endless Marvel movie and everything I'm seeing, I understand on a visceral level, is defying the laws of physics, well, emotionally, I'm out. I'm not emotionally engaged on any level whatsoever.
- [2024] I really, really hate it [TikTok]. There used to be a phrase, which is now ancient Social Media Language: 'snackable content'. Yeah, go f*** yourself, seriously.
- [2024] Anyone at any point would be perfectly justified in tapping me on the shoulder and be like, 'Oh, yeah, it was easy for you'. But the truth is, I've been doing this [acting] for 32 years now, and while I would never suggest in any way that I'm God's gift to anything, I must have been doing something vaguely in the ballpark all these years, just to keep somehow remaining at the dance. But it took a long time for me to not feel a bit of a fraud.
- God, I love to eat. But I'm not one for fine dining, particularly.
- [Which TV programme would you ban?] I'm not a big fan of censorship, but I suppose we could go for a blanket ban on TV Makeover programmes or perhaps just a moratorium.
- [2024] It [social media] ruined everything, didn't it? And that poking people do to each other, you know?
- I remember the first time I ever shot a scene on an actual Hollywood studio lot. I finished the day's filming. I was standing in the car park before I left and I was like, 'Look around, Jack, this might be the only time you ever do this'.
- [2013] I think it's both in your own interest - and the interest of any audience believing you in a different role - for you, between projects, to frankly shut up and f--- off. Seriously! Go away! I will see you again when you're next in costume with a different haircut. Because otherwise you turn up in something and you can feel people going, 'Oh, look, it's so-and-so. He's got a lovely kitchen.'
- I don't normally dress like a young Tory farmer. No, these are [This Life (1996) character] Miles's clothes -- he's a nouveau riche bastard, and he's chucking it about a bit.
- [What cause would you march for?] I'm not a marcher as such, but I have marched. I have my beliefs, but there's nothing worse than reading actors' half baked opinions on subjects they haven't really grasped.
- [2024; agreeing with Ralph Fiennes's recent comments that trigger warnings for theatre audiences should be scrapped because people should be "shocked and disturbed" by what they see] The purpose of art is to teach us about ourselves. Human beings are capable of extraordinary feats of creativity and unbelievable cruelty. And it strikes me that it's a much safer way, ironically, of experiencing psychopathy, or cruelty, if someone's just pretending it in front of you. I mean, what would William Shakespeare make of a trigger warning?
- Anyway, I was in it [Fierce Creatures (1997)] nominally. I was a kind of glorified extra, truth be told, but I was there all the time, because there was a sort of body of young zookeepers. We were sort of like a Greek chorus, really. It's pre-smartphone, so I would read a lot on the edge of the set, and Michael Palin noticed this. And after a few weeks, one day his driver sidled up to me, and he goes, "Michael would like to take you out for lunch. Do you want to come?" And I was like, "Okay." We were at Pinewood Studios, and he took me to a country house hotel or something. And we sat down, just the two of us, and started having lunch. He was asking me about what I was reading, and in my head, I'm like, "I'm having lunch with a f***ing Python. What is f***ing happening?!"
- [What scares you?] The obvious, expiring in a lengthy and painful fashion. Bad things happening to your loved ones. And then, I suppose my job sometimes scares me. And I like that. It's part of it. Not always, thank God, but I do sometimes actively seek out things that will give me a bit of a scare.
- [on the sword training for Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest (2006) and Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End (2007)] This is the most physically demanding section of any job I've ever done. I mean, you know, I'm not built for this. I'm built for, like, saying things and not bumping into furniture, you know, that's kind of what I do. So, hence the guy [stunt double] behind me. But I do a lot of my own stunts... at home.
- [from the Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003) audio commentary] The thing is that this child [Dylan Smith, who plays Young Will Turner] is better spoken than you [Keira Knightley] are in real life, which is upsetting.
- [2002] I loved doing Mr Ripley [The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999)] and I was proud to be in it. But you've got Gwyneth Paltrow, Matt Damon, Jude Law in an Oscar-nominated performance, Cate Blanchett, Phil Seymour Hoffman and then me in a duffel coat. No one knew who the hell I was over there and they still don't. I'm not complaining. I got to make a sexy film in Italy and charge around staying in nice hotels, but there was a lot of cast to wade through before you came to 'Floppy-haired unknown in duffel coat'.
- I'm just an actor, it's my job, and it doesn't really make me special.
- [on being on a flight bound for Los Angeles on September 11, 2001] I was reading and minding my own business, when suddenly I became aware of this sort of slight ripple of discontent spreading throughout the cabin. The captain came on and said: 'Ladies and gentlemen, some of you may have noticed, we have turned round.' I was looking at the location tracker on the little TV screen on my seat, and of course the image showed that we had done a U-turn over Iceland. The captain was never going to tell us that commercial jets were being flown into buildings across America, so he simply told us that there was an incident at Kennedy Airport, and that all American airspace had been closed.
- Cadbury has been adding Oreos to Dairy Milk, which is completely beguiling. I wish they hadn't done that because it's quite hard to resist.
- [on being on a flight bound for Los Angeles on September 11, 2001, which was turned around due to "an incident at Kennedy Airport"] I'd landed at an airport where a plane had just crashed before. And they didn't shut the airport down then, they just used another runway. So I knew it was something major. I remember thinking we were in the middle of a nuclear war, just because it seemed to be the most bizarre set of circumstances. I wasn't terrified, more concerned to find out what was going on. When we finally landed at Cardiff with all these other jumbo jets sitting on the runway, we had barely touched down before everyone was on their mobiles. It was then that the news slowly spread around the cabin.
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