I certainly never pictured myself even attending the Academy Awards, much less winning at 56. I very, very happily settled into a theater career. I did more than that, but I let all of my agents and people go. I said, 'I don't want to be promoted in film anymore. I have enough to do in the theater, so I'm just going to carry on.'
So there's a lot of people tied into believing that the traditional response to the authorship question. In terms of actors, some people get very angry about it.
And people do enjoy the plays at completely different levels. And, likewise, they enjoy the authorship question... at completely different levels.
Nature is very cruel. It is much riskier to love any living being than not. I'm painfully aware that even my little dog is a walking bundle of mortality. I'm painfully aware he's going to pass.
It's something I've enjoyed since being a kid, the fantasy of it, the imagining I'm someone other than who I am. I've always felt claustrophobic in one sense of identity. If anything, I've had to work to develop a sense of my own identity. I used to really hate it when people defined me.
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.
Great actors try to dismiss all ideas from their conscious mind in order to provide an experience that is real.
The scientific-rational mindset is as much a cosmology as the Catholic mindset was in the Middle Ages; scientists are so proud of their mindset and convinced that it's the only reality. I find that worrying.
Burleigh, absolutely; and a lot about Elizabeth. I mean I found when I play Henry V a lot of connections with the hidden history of the connection between Francis Bacon and Elizabeth.
Well, my wife always says to me, and I think it's true, it's very difficult for us to understand the Elizabethan understanding and enjoyment and perception of form as it is to say... it would be for them to understand computers or going to the moon or something.
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.
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 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.
I don't think humanity is the highest form of life that will ever exist in the universe. Maybe that's a bit cynical. But most of the people I know are loving, kind, doing their best.
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.
The bad, angry, upset, wounded people are more interesting, so they're in the news more, but I don't think they're in the majority. I have faith that things will change - I mean, just like everybody else, I don't fix my roof until it's actually leaking, but eventually, we all get round to doing it.
I have great mood swings, maybe because of playing lots of different characters as I do. I'm like a gymnast whose muscles get too stretched. I've got better at it, but I have a lot of emotional energy.
I had to turn down a part in 'Empire of the Sun.' It would have paid £15,000, which was a year's earnings for me then, but I was offered a season at the 'National Theatre.'
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.
I've always looked at famous actors and hope that once they get a part that they have success in, they would reprise it every few years in the way a pop singer will reprise their hits. Like Bob Dylan singing 'Blowin' in the Wind' until he's fed up with it, finding different ways of doing it.
