No one’s personal life is in the public interest. It’s gossip, bottom line. End of story.
Secondarily, I think films that are driven by music also terrify studios.
I was terrible in my first play. After that experience, I had to face that I wasn’t good enough to play with the big boys. I had to go away and learn, so I worked in regional theater for three years. I even understudied at the Kennedy Center.
I’m lucky if I find one movie a year that’s worth doing, and when I do find one, it usually only takes 20-30 days to shoot.
No one should ever feel sorry for me. I’ve been treated very well for the most part.
The audience, the place you’re in, has everything to do with how your performance goes.
When you study, as I did, every theatrical beginning in this country, none of them have been greeted well. The Royal Shakespeare Company was a disaster, Peter Hall was a disaster, Richard Eyre was a disaster, Trevor Nunn was always a disaster.
We’re all victims of our own hubris at times.
And I certainly won’t lay out areas of my life that I think are just private.
Francis Underwood was entirely based on Richard III. When Michael Dobbs wrote ‘House of Cards’ in the original British series, Richard III is what he based the character on.
Directing a film was something I was yearning to do. I always wanted to see if I had the capacity to be a good storyteller.
President Obama will go down as having passed some of the most historic bills in the history of this country.
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. Well, some will still steal it, but I think we can take a bite out of piracy.
To look in the eyes of audiences and see the kind of naughty glee that they got with being on the inside, the audience becomes your co-conspirators.
I cotton to the idea that people are much closer to being flawed; they have problems and don’t always make the right choices.
If we don’t reach out to make theatre affordable to the young generation, we will lose them all.
I don’t even think in terms of ambition.
You have to always be ready, always be alive, and always be willing to move in a new direction.
People don’t tend to hassle me because when I’ve got a hat on, I look like a banker. I’m just a plain guy.
There does seem to be in the U.S. now an ideology and an entrenchment that has stopped people doing what they are hired to do, which is govern rather than run for office the whole time.
As long as we, in the United States, continue to insist that our politicians have to spend all of their time raising millions of dollars for television ads, it will be corrupt. If we leave it up to the politicians to clean up lobbying and finance reform, nothing is going to change.
I think it is just a function of the fact that I moved around so much as a child that I learnt early on to make every place my home.
If you’re not concerned about maintaining an image, you can pursue roads that another actor might not take.
Both ‘Consenting Adults’ and ‘Glengarry Glen Ross’ revolve around the economic stresses of the ’90s. They are about what people do when they’re pushed against that wall, and how they’re manipulated. They are both morality tales, though in very different genres.
In film, movies’ schedules are based on three things: actors’ availabilities, when are sets being built, when you can rent the place you’re going to film in.
I have to remember if I’m at some charitable event where kids are… I try to remember don’t swear in front of the kids!
Have we become so celebrity-obsessed that there is no longer a difference between a character and an actor? I hope not.
But I feel that I have a responsibility to help the film and I have relations with the studio and with those who put up the money so that I can tell a story that I believe in.
I went through a period of great rebellion within my family, when I was about 9 or 10. I was mad, I had no focus, had no real interest in anything, and so I started to do things that were just rebellious and stupid.
I mean we all played as kids. You play games, you take on different characters, you imitate; the fun and the love of play has never left me.
The more shows that are produced, the more writers are hired, producers are hired, actors are hired, directors are hired, it means the more people will get employed. It’s better for the economy. It’s a fantastic thing.
People sometimes have to be reminded, I’m not Frank Underwood. I’m an actor named Kevin Spacey.
What hasn’t surprised me is that audiences, as we found starting with box sets, want control, to decide how they watch it. Appointment viewing is slowly being put slightly behind.
A British director directed ‘American Beauty,’ an important film about American life, and it didn’t matter. What only mattered was everyone’s sensibility.
I don’t categorize characters into one syllable. These are fully-rounded characters that I don’t judge; I just play them.
If someone can watch an entire season of a TV series in one day, doesn’t that show an incredible attention span?
There are times when you do a play when you are living in the character over a two-and-a-half-hour period or longer, and you come to the end of the night, and you can feel like you were hit by a truck.
Over a spell of about three years, I played a series of roles that were, for me, all very different, but most of them came out within a six-month period. They all dealt with a kind of dark territory that in some cases had been mined before in movies.
I couldn’t imagine something asking as much of me as ‘House Of Cards.’ It’s a great warm-up for coming back to the screen.
When you’re just able to distill it down to the idea and the feeling that a character is experiencing in a scene, it can become very, very razor sharp and really clean and really efficient and simple. And sometimes it takes twenty-five years to learn how to be simple.
I can imagine there is going to come a time when someone will do 13 hours of a story without breaks.
Film is very condensed.
I have always believed that the risk takers are eventually rewarded.
My mother was sarcastic and delightful and, trust me, quite remarkable.
At the end of the day, people have to respect people’s differences. I am different than some people would like me to be.
Edward Norton and I have known each other awhile. I just think he’s the real deal, supremely talented and smart. He’s got a great sense of humor.
There’s nothing like standing in a place and wanting nothing so much as to change but simply not being able to.
People have different reasons for the way they live their lives. You cannot put everyone’s reasons in the same box.
London is a very energising place to be.
I love doing impressions.
Being an actor sometimes requires that you ask yourself questions you’d rather not know the answers to.
I’ll tell you one thing. I’ve never heard a director saying that the dailies suck.
The less you know about me, the easier it is to convince you that I am that character on screen.
You can almost hear people saying, ‘We’re going to make a movie about an election’ and ‘We’re going to make a movie about a lobbyist.’ You can hear the yawning start across the nation.
My life will change, because I want it to change; and also because this is something I’m committed to doing and that I believe my life has been leading towards.
I believe if you go to a movie theatre, and you see something you think is incredible, if you walk out of the theatre and there was a bin in the lobby of DVDs of the film you just watched, you would buy four of them – one for you and three for your friends.
I find it sad that by not talking about who I sleep with, that makes me mysterious. There was a time when I would have been called a gentleman.
My admiration for ‘Mary Tyler Moore’ is very, very big because they went out on top.
I’m aware that, from the outside, this looks like I’ve got quite an ego.
I’ve been on sets where things weren’t relaxed because someone was creating tension for no reason.
I liked it because it was such a dangerous script and showed just what human beings are capable of. Here was a movie in which Morgan Freeman and Brad Pitt, who always win in every movie they ever do, simply don’t win. I felt that was outrageous for a commercial movie.
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