Mark Strong Quotes

I loved English at school and realised I would enjoy studying plays. I got into Royal Holloway. They had a little studio theatre where we put on plays, and that’s what I realised I wanted to do. So from there, I went to the Old Vic theatre school to learn how to do it properly.

There have been things over the years that didn’t work. ‘Body Of Lies,’ directed by Ridley Scott, which I did with Russell Crowe and Leonardo DiCaprio, is a really tight action thriller, but when it opened in the U.S. it was number two to ‘Beverly Hills Chihuahua.’

Every now and again, a script comes along that you just can’t put down, and ‘Deep State’ is exactly that – a great example of the best kind of writing.

I had this extraordinarily bizarre moment when, two Fridays ago, my missus gave birth to our second child at 11am and by the same time the following day I was sitting around a table with Ridley Scott, Russell Crowe and Leonardo DiCaprio in Rabat in Morocco, rehearsing a scene we were going to shoot the next day.

I’ve pretty much played every regional accent you can play in the U.K. I’ve played German, French, Arabic; I’ve been Jordanian, Lebanese. I’ve covered a lot of ground.

I’ve put my friends and family through the wringer over the years, I have to say, by doing unspeakable things to people, not the least of which was pulling out poor George Clooney’s fingernails in Syriana.

I’ve never been one of those actors who plays chess with his career and goes, ‘I’m going to wait now and see what project comes up that can move me to this or that level.’ I take stuff as it comes, and it just so happens that it hasn’t dried up yet, touch wood.

I’m sure part of the baggage that I bring having played a lot of villains is also pertinent to the movie [Before I Go To Sleep], because I’m sure people look at me and think, “Oh, I’m not sure I trust him or not.”

You need to try to find a way to humanize your villains. Genuine villains, in real life, still have mothers and daughters and sisters, and they fall in love. They don’t walk around with a big sign saying, “Bad guy,” on their head. They think they’re good guys. If you can play that, I think it makes it more interesting.

Because I had children relatively late – in my 40s rather than in my 20s – it wasn’t anything I ever knew that I would do. It kind of happened to me: I met the right woman and we had children. It was a revelation because it suddenly makes me realize, ‘Oh, I get it. Now I know what to do with the rest of my life.’

Because I had children relatively late – in my 40s rather than in my 20s – it wasn’t anything I ever knew that I would do. It kind of happened to me: I met the right woman and we had children. It was a revelation because it suddenly makes me realize “Oh, I get it. Now I know what to do with the rest of my life.”

It’s important to me that I don’t spend too much time away from the family. I try to pick jobs that will keep me as close to home as possible or, if I have to go far away, for as little time as possible.

Funnily enough, I had a real giggle with Gary Oldman when we were doing an interview together for ‘Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.’ Because I joked I was probably the only British actor who wasn’t in the ‘Harry Potter’ franchise. The same is true of ‘Game of Thrones.’ Also ‘Star Wars.’

My style icon has always been David Bowie. Just because of the variety of images and looks he created.

As an actor, that’s what you want. You want variety. I want to try things that I’m not used to and push my own envelope and see what I’m capable of.

You do a play, or you go on set for the first day of filming: if you don’t have nerves, and you don’t have any kind of adrenalin pushing you forward, then something is wrong.

I can’t imagine anything worse than being in a position that you’re not allowed to live your life privately.

I’m like anyone; I make a lot of my assumptions about actors I don’t know from what I read about them. And then I’ll find those judgments are often completely confounded when I meet them in real life.

Part of me was fascinated by the idea that I would only get next week’s episode a week in advance and wouldn’t actually know where I was going with it, until the script landed on my mat. But, part of me wanted to know what was going to happen.

It’s always interesting when you play a part and then suddenly people think you’re an authority on the subject.

When you’re making a psychological thriller, what you need to do is have an audience on shifting sand so they’re never quite sure where they are.

There’s an honourable tradition of British actors who’ve gone to Hollywood playing baddies. Part of that is because we grow up with Richard III and Macbeth – we’re not afraid of our villains.

It’s great to have the chance to play a character before he goes to the dark side, or the yellow side if you will. Normally, you don’t get that opportunity. The narrative of a movie usually demands that you are that guy from the start.

I was born in Islington and grew up in Islington, so Arsenal was all around me, and supporting them was kind of unavoidable. The first season I started going to watch them was when we did the Double in 1971, so my first heroes were Charlie George, Ray Kennedy, and John Radford.

I do get antsy if I haven’t got lines to learn, a character to play. But yes, I do take holidays.

Rowan Joffe was on top of everything. He knew exactly how he wanted everything to be, right down to the fact when I made those telephone calls, I didn’t do it afterwards in a studio. I think that’s how he operates. He likes it to be as real and as clear as possible.

Interestingly, this character [Doctor Nash] is probably closer to me than somebody like the evil Sir Godfrey in Robin Hood or Lord Blackwood who wants to take over the world in Sherlock Holmes. This is a character that’s English, he’s based in London, and so it’s closer to me than a lot of stuff I’ve been doing recently.

Acting can be a very cruel mistress. It’s not a meritocracy. In other walks of life, by being good at what you do, you can achieve success. That isn’t always the case in this business. Every actor knows that.

You sign for a sequel for everything these days, just in case, options. In the past, you avoided them like the plague because it meant somewhere down the road you couldn’t take a job because you had to do a sequel. Now it’s a feature of pretty much any feature you do.

There is no part of me that wants to have to pull the blinds down when I’m talking to my wife about dinner because some photographer is in a bush outside.

Instantly when I’m acting, I kick into Frank Agnew face.

I’ve always thought that speaking a foreign language from a young age makes you a little bolder when it comes to speaking and doing accents and things like that.

All these portrayals we see of knights fighting must be absolute rubbish because knights in armour could literally have only had two or three blows and then they’d have had to sit down to have a cup of tea.

In the past, if I didn’t work, I didn’t eat but now I feel I can not work and I won’t starve.

I’m very organized and tidy in my home life and I generally do something myself rather than farm it out to somebody else. I don’t have an assistant or anything because I think I can do it myself.