Words matter. These are the best Colin Firth Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
I do think I’m a character actor.
My parents and grandparents have always been engaged in teaching or the medical profession or the priesthood, so I’ve sort of grown up with a sense of complicity in the lives of other people, so there’s no virtue in that; it’s the way one is raised.
The thing is that anybody looks good in the right clothes. It will affect your bearing. It will affect your demeanor. It informs the way you behave.
We are actors who show up for work in our sloppy gear, and we’ve got this extraordinary tailor. It’s someone else who’s done the design; someone else who’s cut the suit; someone else who’s measured it. Basically, your job is to just wear it.
A life of very, very serious, po-faced films would drive me nuts. I need – and I’m fortunate to have – a fairly varied menu in that respect. I mean, I was shooting ‘Mamma Mia!’ at the same time as I was doing Michael Winterbottom’s ‘Genova’. That was a very, very bizarre summer.
Hollywood hasn’t aggressively pursued me. Neither have I aggressively pursued Hollywood.
I think it’s quite extraordinary that people cast me as if I’m Warren Beatty: until I met my present wife, at the age of 35, you could name two girlfriends.
If one lazily thinks of what a fashion designer might do if he’s going to conquer cinema next, it would be taking the opportunity to display his fashion sensibilities.
Obviously, if people love a movie, and it has the possibility of continuation, then there is going to be a question of whether it’s worth doing another one. There’s also cynicism and skepticism about sequels.
I have a kind of neutrality, physically, which has helped me. I have a face that can be made to look a lot better – or a lot worse.
I love ‘Manhattan’, and I know it’s not one of Woody’s favorites.
We’ve always been involved with America – I have a son who lives there and it’s a big part of my life.
We all know the dangers of sequels. Lightning doesn’t strike twice in the same place too often, and I think you’ve got to move beyond it, go the extra mile and have the courage not to just repeat the first one.
It used to be that I was always paranoid or a loser or something so there’s usually something that you seem to associate yourself with at one time or another.
I had heard all sorts of stories about Woody Allen’s directing – directorial approach. And some of them turned out to be myth, but one of them was that he doesn’t rehearse, and another was that he doesn’t really direct. If he doesn’t like it… he cuts it out of the movie or even replaces you. And he doesn’t talk to you.
If you don’t mind haunting the margins, I think there is more freedom there.
I was delighted to become a popular-culture reference point. I’m still delighted about it actually, and I still find it to be weird.
In filming, you’re waiting – you’re waiting for lights, you’re waiting for people to set things up – and when you’re not waiting, you’re repeating.
As much as the next person, I want to be approved of, but I’m not greedy for that stuff.
Almost every comedy you see is about people making all wrong choices and making all the errors of judgement possible. Good comedy is when it works on this scale. Because it is psychologically very real.
I was in a lake in ‘Love Actually’, and I was attacked by some hideous aquatic beast and was rushed to the hospital by a man named Rafael! Something stung my elbow, and it blew up to the size of a tennis ball.
My primary instinct as an actor is not the big transformation. It’s thrilling if a performer can do that well, but that’s not me. Often with actors, it’s a case of witnessing a big party piece but wondering afterwards, where’s the substance?
I do notice that when I’ve been away and I come back to London. People look at you. People are ready to pick arguments.
It’s a film called ‘Kursk’, which is a true story about a submarine disaster. There was an accident on board a Russian submarine in the year 2000, and it stranded a large number of sailors. That’s next.
Most actors will tell you they have some sort of dream of doing something other than what they’re doing.
I backpacked through France and Italy in my teens, and then I was at Cannes with the first movie I did in ’84.
In this case it appealed to me partly because it felt close to me in some ways. This is about a confused, bewildered middle class Englishman adrift in smalltown America and that has definitely been me.
Forget trying to be sexy. That’s just gruesome.
To be bothered wherever you go – it’s not a rational thing to want at all.
People have the idea of missionaries as going out with the Bible and hitting natives with it. It’s not really what they were doing. They were all doing something rather different.
