Obviously, in this day and age, with the TV shows, there are some really interesting ones. I'm not that interested in going and doing a network show, but like everybody else, trying to find something good.
I think television is really incredible because of the fact that you get to sit with a character for so, and the character does something different, every week. I think that's really interesting.
It's a little strange, after all these years of working on camera, but once you start to watch the other people who do this a lot and realize how much of what you're doing has to just come through your voice, I found it really interesting.
I do read movie blogs. I think what's really interesting - Probably everyone says this, but what's interesting is it, it takes away the power, from the newspaper magnates, so be it Murdoch or whatever. I mean, it's like the people taking it back. Isn't it? I mean, do people talk about this all the time?
It's funny, because it's like the fight when you watch it, it's probably going to be like five minutes, but it's taken us like a month to shoot it so I think what was really interesting was that instead of going through an entire fight sequence, you're doing one or two moves over and over and over, so I'd say it's less exhausting than actually training, because you're not really constantly going over the choreography, like the whole entire thing with everybody. You're just doing that one part that they need in the shot.
It's really interesting, for an actor, that you can continue to do season after season and not play the same role.
That was a really interesting series [Threshold ] that I think would've been really great had it continued. I know Brannon Braga, who was running the show at the time, had a lot of really interesting ideas for what was going to happen the second, third, fourth, and fifth seasons, and they had it really planned out what was going to go on. But CBS just decided to pull the plug on it.
The obsession with food filled my childhood - that's what happens when your parents are from a place or time where people really might starve. In America, my Jordanian father spent decades cooking professionally and pursuing his dream of a restaurant, and it was one of the central ways that he explained himself to his American children. Even though he's a passionate talker, he has a hell of a time with listening. His cooking gave him a way of having a conversation - which was a really interesting thing for a writer to look at.
My McQueen particularly was hard to make, because my father was dying. I see it, and I see my confusion, my pain, my everything. I thought that it was really interesting to be able to put the people from behind the camera in front of the camera as they make it.
I think there's some pretty amazing language in the Bible. The thing that's always been interesting to me about religion is that compared to the more modern spirituality, the West Coast pseudo-Buddhist thing that people go for these days, actual Buddhism and Islam have been looking at these philosophical questions, at really hard questions, for a long time. There's a lot of stuff that philosophy doesn't talk about, and in the secular world, a lot of times, people don't talk about these ideas, and that was always really interesting for me.
I'm really excited to act again because when I started out, there was an innocent sort of perception of the world that was coming though me, and I think now through a lot of experience and life and understanding, I've come full circle to having a purer response to things. So my craft will be really interesting to work from this place because I think acting is about being in tune with yourself - or maybe the struggle to be in tune with yourself.
When I hear myself speak French, I look at myself differently. Certain aspects will feel closer to the way I feel or the way I am and others won't. I like that - to tour different sides of yourself. I often find when looking at people who are comfortable in many languages, they're more comfortable talking about emotional stuff in a certain language or political stuff in another and that's really interesting, how people relate to those languages.
When looking at female body builders and reading about the industry and the culture, their bodies just break down. They end up having to get breast implants and not having menstrual cycles. The obsession of pushing your physical self way beyond what nature is expecting is really interesting. I liked the idea of these women; it's their career, but it's also their obsession.
I think people are uncomfortable seeing pregnant women, particularly with any kind of conflict. [Pregnancy is] very much a projection of life and love, but it's also very complicated. People have very complicated pregnancies. They could be accidental or people suffer depression, and that was a really interesting thing for me. And a challenging thing. I have not been pregnant. I don't know what that's like, let alone to be really conflicted about it. Acting in the film about pregnancy was a really interesting thing to do.
I find human behavior really interesting. I think that's ultimately what being an actor is. You explore what it means to be human.
You see a lot of interesting visual irony on movie sets all the time, you know duality, set illusions, the reality, all that stuff. You play with interesting materials that you couldn't afford to otherwise. You meet interesting people that you work with, have special machinists or mold makers and make-up people, and people who make prosthetic appliances for actress' faces. It's really interesting kind of witch's brew of people in that business, aside from the sleeze bags you hear about on the financial end.
I just like good stories. I like really interesting scripts, I love really great filmmakers. And I'm open to all genres and all stories. But, there's certain ones that attract me, and I don't really sort of look at what I think is going to be successful, I look at more so, you know, is this what I want to do regardless of what everybody else thinks?
I'm not political in the sense of activity. My activity, I guess, are the films. I can't really say if I'm worried or a bit optimistic. I think in a funny way I'm a little bit optimistic because even though nothing has really changed, and even though the governments keep changing and there's always chaos in the Arab world because it's not easy to cope with politically, for me it's really interesting.
Now in Wikipedia it's really interesting. If you put something incorrect up on Wikipedia within minutes there are people crawling all over that sentence saying, "This is wrong" or "I want to change this" or "You've got to include an amplification," et cetera. So there's this massive checks and balances that actually makes that accuracy work. This is the kind of model that we - and I'm not sure why no one's discussing this - that we now have to begin to apply to fake news.
I think that a lot of the time I don't go for something in particular. I see what comes to me, I filter it out. I never really strive to play a particular character or do a particular genre of film. As long as it's a good script and a great range of people and my character is really interesting I can't see any reason not to do it.
I think plans failing is a really interesting question. I've been on a long journey. I'm 54 now and that's seriously old. I hope I still have heaps of years to go. Every day there's new success and some failures. But believe you me you can always get better - but things don't always go how you'd expect all the time. What you have to do is pick yourself up and keep going. That's part of life.
Someone said something really interesting the other day they said, "Even documentaries aren't what happened," you know there's a huge jump between life and then putting something in a two hour movie, even if it's a documentary.
I try not to read reviews, but if it's a really important review or somebody sends it to me, I'll read it. It's really interesting when you read a review of yourself, you see this weird reflected image - it's like looking a funhouse mirror. Like, "It's sort of me, but is my neck really that elongated?" Sometimes it's vaguely embarrassing what people think of you. When I was in Italy doing this press-interview day, this guy asked me, "Are you a tortured soul?" It's embarrassing to have somebody think you're a tortured soul, or that you think of yourself as a tortured soul.
Agendas in general don't work. The agenda is a thing that is perpetually destroyed. But through that destruction, something really interesting comes up.
I believe that it doesn't matter where you work or what you have access to because anything can help. If you're working in an ice cream shop, you can ask your boss if you can give away twenty ice cream cones to an organization every Friday afternoon. It's really interesting to see what people are willing to help you with if you can make it easy for them.
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