Stephen Rea

“I'd like to own a movie camera - a proper one, with film, not a digital thing. Celluloid has more character.”

“We didn't have a television, so I grew up with books. This isn't to suggest I'm an intellectual, but I do read a lot because part of acting is an exploration of literature.”

“I've never been in a bad play. There might have been bad productions and I might have been bad in them, but I've never been in a play that wasn't interesting or worthwhile doing on some level.”

“If you're playing a lead, you're shaping the movie. When you're playing a supporting role, you've got only a moment to make it count.”

“Acting is way of making yourself exist.”

“I don't feel ashamed of my wife's political background, and I don't think she should either. I feel that the people who administered the North of Ireland for the last 20 years should be ashamed. There you are.”

“I'm not in denial about technology, but my mother used to say when I was a kid, 'Son, you're handless,' because I couldn't fix anything. My ambition is to be a Luddite.”

“At least when you're acting you can be someone. In front of the camera you have to be yourself. And who am I?”

“I have never been to a brothel. I don't think I could go into one.”

“I'm enjoying it, but I still don't know why I'm hooked on acting.”

“I see people with laptops as being enslaved to something they can't live without.”

“Angel was the first Irish feature film. Neil's first movie and my first movie.”

“I loved movies as a teenager and saw as much American cinema as I could, but I hated the English films of the early '60s and had absolutely no point of identification with them.”

“I believe some people in this business suffer from fame because they behave in a famous fashion.”

“People ask me to smile for the camera, but somehow it always comes out gloomy.”

“My kids act all the time and it's exactly what I used to do.”

“When you're playing the part of a saxophone or a trumpet player, both of which I have done, it would be nice to be able to play like John Coltrane, but you can't. Your job is to do something else. And I'm not sure what it is, but I don't think I'd be acting Niels Bohr any better if I went and studied physics for five years.”

“That was the beginning of modern acting for me. You don't have to tell a camera everything. It gets bored if you do and wants to look elsewhere.”

“The Butcher Boy is a very great novel indeed and a very important Irish novel. The ambiguity of that is, he's writing a book about an appalling situation and he does it in a hilarious way.”

“I've been worked over by the English press because there's an assumption that my politics are identical with my wife's, and for that matter that my wife's politics are identical with her politics of 20 years ago.”