Top 35 Mark Rylance Quotes

Moments are incredible, but in my fantasy mind I see a Globe company which is renowned throughout the world for what it does with pure storytelling. So that people come and say: it’s not just the building, it’s the only place you can hear this kind of work.

I know that some people who move into film lose their nerve for the stage.

There are still people, obviously, who are stopping you and want a selfie because they need to justify their own lives by being in close proximity to a celebrity… but those are minor with me. I’m not a major celebrity.

In a way, I think science is the modern religion, and at times, I despise it as much as I despise other religions because it really will only accept stuff that fits its masculine ability to define the world.

I think that was very important to Bacon… personally. I think he went to great efforts to get a house for the Stratford man, to make it so difficult for us to prove that it was Francis Bacon, because it is very difficult to prove.

And people do enjoy the plays at completely different levels. And, likewise, they enjoy the authorship question… at completely different levels.

You feel a lot of rage when someone dies. I have a lot of faith in nature, but it can be cruel.

I love film. I love going to see films; I always have. I’ve done quite a few.

I did audition a lot. One’s agent is keen to get you into film and TV because there’s more money. I was always getting myself into commitments to theatre companies.

It’s difficult for me to say, but I don’t think the sex scenes are particularly erotic.

If I were to do a sequel, it would be with Sophie as a very old woman and The BFG the same, a bit like that ‘Let the Right One’ in film.

Chaos can be incredibly creative.

I learnt so much wit, really, from the Globe audiences. If you can make a circle, even in a proscenium theater, if you can get a circular energy going, so that all these people are involved with it and present, then there is something curious that happens with the imagination.

My accent does slip. When I arrived in England in 1978 at 18, I was shocked to find myself ‘the American’ at RADA. The English and the Americans have an intense relationship. They helped us out in the Second World War.

But I find with Francis Bacon, some of the things were in the place, and someone who was connected with these schools of thought, and someone who had a motivation that equals the scope of the comedy and the tragedy in the plays.

I’m quite simple, really. I like to play and inhabit my character. I really like to inhabit the situation. It’s the situation that intrigues me.

There were terrific shows on TV like ‘Star Trek’ and ‘Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea’ and ‘Wild Wild West.’ All us kids would watch them. We would act them out in the basement. I think I found that I could speak a bit more clearly when I was playing with other people.

Every great filmmaker at some moment makes a war film.

I’m still struggling with whether I might want to get off the Internet. More and more people I know have. Daniel Day Lewis doesn’t do the Internet at all, and I noticed he had many more books open around his house.

You need to gain the confidence that you’re doing enough on film. You must resist the temptation to do too much.

You know, I don’t think you need to be educated to be a great actor.

Our job is to make manifest the story, to be it. In a sense, the theatre is such a big star itself, bigger than any Shakespearean actor I could hire, that we should take the opportunity to fill it with voice and verse and movement, not interpretation.

And it is a very beautiful idea, and possibly true, that a common man from Stratford with a common education was able to write these plays.

Shakespeare was the main thing I did in my life from the age of 16 when I first played ‘Hamlet’ at school. I then did summer stock the next summer and then went to RADA and joined the RSC and ran my own company and then worked at the Globe. That was about 30 years of my life.

Great actors try to dismiss all ideas from their conscious mind in order to provide an experience that is real.

It’s amazing how much the sense of telling a story with a beginning, middle, and end helps me to relax. I find that the mass of stories that one is subjected to living one’s life is otherwise overwhelming.

I think, early on, I was very distrustful of authority yet needed a lot of approval from it. I was in that kind of bind. Which is a kind of abuse bind.

I love poetry. If my mind gets a bit tight or bound up with information or depressed with bad news, I find a good book of poetry is like going to the gym for an hour. My mind just expands.

You’re stealing people’s secrets. You convince them to give up their life and imagine the life you’ve created is real or more interesting. If it’s a good play, they’ll cry or think private thoughts about their lives or laugh.

I can’t believe, even in ‘The Guardian,’ people ask the questions, ‘Where did ISIS come from?’ ‘How did this happen?’ ‘Why do young Muslim women go off to join them?’ Maybe because we’ve been degrading their people since 1917. Maybe their teenage years are a little bit more stressed than that of Christianity.

There have been more books alone written about Hamlet than have been written about the Bible.

I like to connect with the other actors in a fantasy situation.

As a leader, you get a pat on the back when you make a hard choice.

It’s strange how the mind works while you’re acting, because you have all sorts of quick thoughts going on as well as the motivations with the character.

I think the idea that life ends when we physically die is as painful as the idea in Cromwell’s time that there’s some awful purgatory, and you have to give money to the Catholic church to get your loved ones out. I certainly have experienced a lot of evidence that there’s a consciousness that isn’t physical.