As a child, I was always drawn to heroic characters. I decided I wanted to act when I realised that Superman and all those gangsters and Indians were just real people in costume.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Christopher Reeve so completely inhabited the character Superman when he was in that costume, and that had such a huge effect on me as a child, watching those films back in the '70s. There was so much of that character that was, for me, Superman.
When I was a boy, I always saw myself as a hero in comic books and in movies. I grew up believing this dream.
I always used to pretend to be different characters - cowboys, that sort of thing. I used to think that the Indians lived over the mountains that I could see out of my bedroom. As I grew up, I started to understand that acting was actually a craft, and there was no question about it, that was exactly what I was going to do.
You have to always try to think about them like real people first, and not just heroes. They have to be real characters. As people do more and more superhero stuff, the characters are what distinguish it, just like in cop shows.
I've always loved movies and animation. When I was little, I was always pretending to be some alter ego superhero. For years it was Ultraman, ninjas, Spiderman and other cool super heroes.
As an actor, I've been all over the map, but since I've moved to Hollywood, people tend to cast me in these more imposing characters, which is actually really fun for me. I've always been way more attracted to playing that than the hero.
The truth is that I've always wanted to be an actor, ever since I was a child. I used to see these English movies which were shown to us in our school every Saturday, and then I used to enact the hero's part in my head.
I would rather portray the hero if it's a really great film. All my favorite fictional film characters are heroes, such as in 'The Last of the Mohicans' and 'Robin Hood.'
I was never able to write seriously about heroes because I was very aware that I was not one and that in my background there was not this heroic thing.
Very few of my characters are totally heroic or totally villainous.