When I'm playing a character like Jonathan in Ripley's Game I want to be in the moment when he's feeling pain; this very ordinary person who finds himself in extraordinary circumstances.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
It's a very fascinating thing for an actor to play somebody who is suffering, and you have to express the suffering, but in an inarticulate way and sometimes a dysfunctional way, through violence.
You have to have sympathy for and an empathy with a character in order to play them.
The actor becomes an emotional athlete. The process is painful - my personal life suffers.
I've been trying to take this journey over the last four years of getting away from playing manipulative and villainous characters and playing characters that are affected by what happens to them as opposed to unaffected.
Actors have an opportunity to use storytelling as a way to solve pain.
I don't think I could play a character that I couldn't relate to somehow. I'm not unfamiliar with frustration, anger, shame, helplessness and a load of other emotions that make up our psycho-soup. I try to focus on that frustration, that sense of unfairness, and multiply it.
What can I say: I'm a writer - I enjoy forcing pain and suffering on my characters!
Portraying emotionally ill characters gives me the chance to really act.
Living in somebody else's pain for an actor man, it's actually nice when you get to feel that kind of emotion. That's what I like.
I look at something like 'Short Term 12,' and that character has a lot of pain, and I wouldn't have known how to portray that if I hadn't experienced pain myself.