Part of my strength as an actor comes from what I've learned all these years: when you play a villain, you try to get the light touches; when you play a hero, you try to get in some of the warts.
I like playing guys where it's as important what they're thinking as what they're saying. Those are the people I like playing, and the actor that I strive to be. I like actors who work in that area and I like parts that allow me to work in that area.
Mads Mikkelsen’s acting is very subtle, precise, nuanced, so he brings something completely different to the character. If you compare Mads’ Hannibal to Anthony Hopkins’ for example. Not to mention that Mads Mikkelsen is very handsome and sexy, so he brings that to the character as well.
What I enjoyed about being in the world of Jessica Jones, as Luke Cage, is that I wasn't front and center because it was Jessica Jones' story, but it allowed me to find the character from a different perspective.
When you're performing, you're playing to the back row. With acting, you have to be more nuanced.
I admire an actor that can do a lot with doing nothing really, for the most part. I like doing a lot by doing so little.
I learnt to keep my acting subtle.
My acting's very understated. I think my sad and happy don't play that differently onscreen.
It's a fine line. If you withhold too much, you come across as wooden - as I've often been described in some movies. Fair enough. I believe that the best performances are the ones that an audience has to search for.
With acting, there are a lot of subtleties and non-verbals involved. If someone is over there, getting eaten by a shark, there's a non-verbal way of how to act that. There's a certain nuance to acting that does not come intuitively to me. It's something I still have to learn.
I'm almost sometimes too subtle in my acting.
I think someone like Khandi Alexander, who's now on 'Treme,' is one of the most extraordinary actresses I've seen in years. But she's dependent on someone brilliant like David Simon to realize that and to give her a forum. Tyler Perry's not interested in that kind of nuance because it doesn't sell.
It's hard to talk about acting because I don't think it's quite as explicit as a lot of people might think. And that's probably the best thing about it.
If I play a villain, I try to find his lightness and his good side. And if I play a hero or a good guy, I'll try to find his darkness or his flaws. Because I don't believe in good and evil. I believe in grays.
When doing theater, you have to find great satisfaction in the small things. There's going to be a repetition and a redundancy night after night, but it's the small variations in those moments - a word, a tone of voice, the smallest sense of enlightenment that can happen in an instant onstage - that will be the most rewarding.
I enjoy playing someone who doesn't show up and say, 'This is what I am, and this is what I'm about,' but is someone who, four hours in, makes you go, 'Really? Is that what's going on?'
