There are times when you do a play when you are living in the character over a two-and-a-half-hour period or longer, and you come to the end of the night, and you can feel like you were hit by a truck.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
With my plays, when the lights go down, at least the audience isn't thinking, 'Oh, God, two more hours of this.'
Film and television are so piecemeal. You do one scene, and then you put it to bed, and then you do a scene that comes before. In a play, you have to go from beginning to end every night, and that's harder, but also more fulfilling in a way.
When you do a play, you have all this time to rehearse and grow into the character. In television, even though you're waiting and waiting and waiting, once you're actually on set engaging in the scene with another actor, time is of the essence.
I get the impression sometimes that a play arrives in a sequence of events that I have no control over.
When I play a villain, I usually get home and sleep straight through the night. It's physically and emotionally draining.
When you've been a character in a movie - and this has happened when we've done concerts as Spinal Tap or as The Folksmen - people see you as characters walking out of a movie. And you appear in public, then, to play, it's a very schizophrenic thing.
When I was younger - I don't do this too much now - but sometimes if I couldn't sleep, I would lie in bed and imagine all the characters I've played at a dinner table together.
Plays are about understanding what happens, what it means. If we just leaned into the story, for lack of a better word, it would still be a powerful story but, like delight, it might disappear an hour after you saw it.
When you're doing a play you get to go full speed ahead, all night, in front of an audience. It's a roller-coaster ride, responding to other actors, it feeds you.
When you do a play, you have the kind of nightly feeling of accomplishment. But you also have the daily dread of the doing it every night. And because you're doing the whole thing every day, it's like climbing up the mountain every single night. With a movie it's like climbing the mountain very slowly, over months of filming.