Mark Strong Quotes

I live in New York, and Clara lives in Recife. The character is Brazilian, and as I read the script, I felt like Kleber [Mendonca] had been spying on me in order to create this role [in Aquarius]. Clara and I have different backgrounds. I come from an intuitive world, and she's an academic, but when we got together, we really became one. There are many times when I'm watching the film where Clara will say something, and I will find myself agreeing with her. It was the first time that I had this weird sensation that the character I played is so me, but yet it's so her.

I loved being Maleficent. I was quite sad to put my staff down and put my horns away because somehow, she just lives in a different world.

I play a detective, very close to myself actually.

I love making people laugh, and to be able to be that humorous character was great. And I actually was very similar to Neville Longbottom. I was very shy and chubby-cheeked. I wasn't bullied at school, but I wasn't particularly outgoing. We were similar. And so I loved playing him.

You always miss them [characters you've played] once you've walked away, but part of them always stays with you too.

Doing a film, or being sent scripts to look at a certain character, it's very odd for me. I tend to take it very personally.

I've always wanted to play a soldier and I'd never taken on a character where I'm the happy-go-lucky protagonist. I've played a lot of jerks recently.

I'm quite excited to not play a Xena type character - it's probably closer to me than any character I've ever played.

I feel like a lot of my work on stage, I've gotten to play a wider range of characters than I have on film. This feels closer to who I am than stuff I've played on stage, or, like, Olive Kitteridge.

It was really fun and intimate in a way. Working with George Miller is exquisite. Gloria is different from anything I've ever played before. The first time I saw the characters in the studio I remember thinking that Mumble looked just like Elijah, with such a cute and endearing face. I don't think Gloria looks that much like me.

I think there's always pieces of yourself that bleed into your character. That's inevitable. In some ways, we have similarities, but in other ways, we're completely different. It's hard to say because I'm an actor living in a world where we're all pretty privileged, and this guy is fighting for his life. They're very different circumstances. Within those circumstances, there are probably ways that we react to certain situations that are similar.

[C. Montgomery] Burns is much purer evil than Nixon was. I think it's the purity of his evil that attracts me as a comic character.

In The Greens Are Gone, I play a character that's bipolar, so that was a big step and quite a challenge.

There is one scene where he is kissing up my back. It is really sexy and I didn't know he was going to do it. He started doing it and in the film you see me saying, whew, and that wasn't acting, that was really me thinking, whew, oh my goodness Daniel Craig is kissing my back! I really did. I had to stop and remind myself that I was playing a character and I was acting in a film.

I do believe that you have to bring some degree of truth from yourself to the role [Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street ]in and I'll admit it here, I have shaved a grown man before. I have done it. And it wasn't Tim [Burton].

As an actor, you can't judge. A great actress from Spain said, "We, the actors, are lawyers of the characters we play. We have to defend them, no matter what."

It's extreme. The character comes back from the dead, and, at first he doesn't know where he is, how he got there.... How does that tie in with the physicality? I just didn't think he should be too healthy-looking, so I lost some weight for the role.

There's a little bit of me in all of the characters I've played. I've never really had the opportunity to play something that's a complete departure from me.

Michael, from 'Six Dance Lessons...' He was somebody who had a lot of self-loathing; being a gay man who lost his family and felt ostracized. It was an interesting character to play. He was so bitter and jaded about life. Even though I'm not like that personally, everybody has a side of themselves that tends to look at the negative side of things. He was an interesting character to play.

It's not as if the stories merge to a point where you think they are your life, but you do let them in the front door and the back door, and it's okay that sometimes certain characters stay for dinner.

I'm sure there's pieces of me in all the characters I play.

I always wished there was somebody like the Coen Brothers and they appeared. And so yeah, my favorite role that I've ever done was in The Man Who Wasn't There. That's my very favorite character I've ever played.

I think Cruella is evil, because she's the devil. But all the other characters, I was able to find a common humanity with them somewhere, knowing where they're most fragile, where they're most vulnerable, knowing some of the things that happened to them that might have formed this kind of behavior.

I love playing a character that has more than 90 minutes, and that keeps going.

I think in every character there are aspects of yourself that you bring to it. But then it would be really boring to just play yourself.