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- Well, there is a pressure,
but you dissolve the pressure by working hard.
If you feel the pressure and you buckle
or you feel the pressure and you don't put in the time
or the prep, you're gonna choke.
You use the pressure or you use the fear
or challenge to just put in the time,
and it's up to you to fly with it or try to.
[soft dramatic instrumental music]
So The Ragged Child, it was the televised version
of a play that I had appeared in
with the National Youth Music Theater,
which was a young people's theater company.
It pulled together from auditions all around Great Britain,
kids from all types of backgrounds.
It was an interesting experience.
I guess it was one of the first times I'd
ever done this, the stop start process of filming.
It was very much an ensemble piece,
so each of us shared the weight of the responsibility
of the piece, although the lead
was played by Johnny Lee Miller,
who obviously has gone on for a wonderful career.
So I view my time in the NYMT as a big part
of my training, actually.
Your training never stops, but that was a real part
of stepping up and taking responsibility as an actor.
Jerome Morrow, that's a nice name.
- It's my name.
- I can't be you without it.
- What makes you think you can be me at all?
So I'd done a couple of other films,
but Gattaca felt like a huge, huge break.
First of all, to work with Ethan and Uma,
Alan Arkin, Ernest Borgnine, Gore Vidal,
this extraordinary group of highly regarded
and talented individuals.
I guess I was spoiled looking back
because also to work on something
that I just so believed in, unique, resonant,
timely, political, had great style.
But my memories of it were wow, yeah,
moving to LA for the first time.
I was staying in one of these little self-contained suites,
just up off Sunset, renting a [laughs] Ford Mustang,
driving around, hanging out a lot with Ethan.
Ethan and I got on very, very well, I remember.
We filmed some of it in Marin County.
We did that drive up the highway together,
which took us a weekend.
It really felt like the first time I'd come
to Hollywood and I was making a movie,
and it was a true moment of destiny
and dreams.
It's great that that film that early on in my career
was a film that also stood the test of time.
I've made about, God knows, 30, 40 films since then.
That's still a film people talk about,
which is really, it really meant something.
There are a couple of others I did around that time,
which people [laughing] don't talk about so much,
which is no bad thing. [laughs]
Oh, I can just imagine, if only Dickie would settle down.
Doesn't every parent deserve a grandchild?
Oh, God.
Never, never.
Swear on your ring, Marge.
I'm never going back.
The Talented Mr. Ripley.
I was making a film in London produced by Carolyn Choa.
I was aware that Carolyn was married to Anthony Minghella.
Anthony, by all accounts, was watching the rushes
of this film come in decided to offer me Dickie Greenleaf.
In my insane arrogance as a 20 something year old,
hostile to the idea that I would be cast
as this pretty boy, turned it down. [laughs]
I was thinking at the time that
what I should really be doing
is just playing character roles and hunchback,
just trying to find real weird, twisted characters.
I luckily came to my senses and realized
that he was putting together this extraordinary group
of young actors and that he himself,
obviously, having just won 50 Oscars or whatever it was
for The English Patient, was probably gonna be good,
safe hands to put myself in.
And my experience of that particular film
was absolutely golden, but it was also somewhat misleading
in that I was sent, first of all,
down to Ischia to get a suntan,
learn to sail, and practice my saxophone.
I've never since been given that [laughs] kind
of carte blanche or invitation on any other job, sadly.
I was overwhelmed with nerves because suddenly,
you have Gwyneth and Cate and Philip and Matt turning up
alongside all these other great actors.
I used the bravado and the confidence
and the swagger of Dickie as a way
of pulling my way through that,
and I think I pretended I was Dickie,
basically, for the whole time, which worked.
It was very well received.
It was the first time I got a nomination by the Academy,
and so in many ways, it was a huge turning point in my life.
It still sits in my heart as one
of the most wonderful memories, mm.
[light jaunty instrumental music]
Many a Mecha has gone to the end of the world,
never to come back.
That is why they call the end of the world Manhattan.
- And that's why we must go there.
- My memories of AI, wow, there are so many.
So I went from the sun-kissed coast of Italy
to East Germany, where I was filming Enemy at the Gates.
I get this phone call from Steven Spielberg,
which is the phone call most actors
spend a lifetime waiting for,
and he was developing AI alongside Stanley Kubrick,
who sadly passed away early, early on in the development
of this particular version of the film.
I would finish working Berlin, fly to Paris,
get on the Concord, fly to New York,
and land before I'd left, get met on the runway
at JFK with a helicopter, and flown to Steven's house.
This is [laughs] to rehearse.
If that doesn't make your head spin, nothing will.
That kind of treatment is, well, for me, otherworldly.
It was a really interesting experience in the hands
of this extraordinarily powerful director.
He was incredibly collaborative,
and we came up with this idea of the dancing
and the music and the guy with a walking jukebox
so he could paly old classics and dance to them
and seduce whoever he had to seduce.
He was open to so many ideas, and, in a way,
the challenge was just be as imaginative
and as creative as you can, and I'll see if we can do it.
And most of the time, he was like yeah, we can do that.
The makeup was an extraordinary journey.
Initially, they wanted to make a fake me,
so they took a mold of my face
and stuck the mask of me on my face.
First of all, it made my head way too big,
and secondly, it meant that you
couldn't actually register anything I was doing.
So we ended up just built these tiny,
little pieces that just made every line
on my face perfectly symmetrical and straight.
And then I also remember, because, unfortunately,
it all grew back tenfold, they shaved almost
[laughs] all my hair off.
Everything was shaved every morning, and they sprayed me
like a doll every morning and polished me.
Sitting in a chair for four hours and being transformed
does help because you go in as one thing,
and you come out really looking and feeling as another.
I had a rigorous routine that I went through everyday
with the choreographer.
That discipline was also very important
to setting this physical
neutral zone for Gigolo Joe to operate out of,
and getting the walk right.
'Cause he was a robot, we wanted certain things
and certain moves to be repetitive.
And if you watch the way he walks, people walk like.
He actually walked with a rhythm.
He did this thing where he turns his head every other move.
And so getting into that and locking that
was an important ground zero to start at everyday.
Finding the character is finding the right look,
the clothes, the makeup, the hair, all of that,
and then you end up with what just feels right.
[subdued atmospheric music]
- And what do you do?
- I work wood.
[hammer banging in distance] [men chattering]
Cut.
Mostly work wood.
Well, Cold Mountain.
So I'd start this extraordinary relationship
with Anthony Minghella,
and I remember him saying come on the odyssey with me.
This is gonna be this huge physical journey, and it was.
We battled the seasons and the elements every single day.
It was deeply emotional, too,
because a lot of my character's journey was physical.
I remember also, I had this big relationship
with animals and that Anthony wanted all the animals
to be real, so I was always fishing
and learning to cut cows open
and pull chickens' heads off and all of that stuff.
It was very hands on.
If you're up a mountain in six foot of snow,
you're up there with a crew.
If you're in a bog or if you're in a swamp
with gators six feet away, they're in there with you.
So it's a very bonding experience
to go from baking heat to sub-zero temperatures
and everything in between.
It's all about the people around you.
If you're with a really wonderful group of people
and the part requires it and they're there with you,
then absolutely, you do it again.
Please tell me the truth.
- Why?
- Because I'm addicted to it, because,
without it, we're animals.
- I'd seen Closer on stage in London and in New York.
Again, Mike Nichols, a director just of legend.
A dream team.
How lucky am I?
Suddenly, I'm in the room
with these other three wonderful, wonderful actors.
I remember the rehearsal process was really interesting.
We rehearsed it in New York.
We read through the script, but,
most of the time, we really just listened
to Mike recounting stories of his love life.
I remember halfway through saying to each other like,
maybe we're not gonna input anything.
And what I realized he was doing
was he was laying his life bare in order to feel safe.
It was like he was in confession.
And so suddenly, anything we discussed,
anything we shared, because the piece is about meeting
and breaking up with the loves of your life,
so it's always dealing with the most raw, the most intimate,
the most revealing and vulnerable moments.
And in a way, he was going through this process
of confession and allowing
the conversation to always be safe, which worked.
We shot it in and around London,
which was a real treat because I was at home.
So much of London now I drive past
and I think, oh yeah, I filmed there or oh gosh.
And so suddenly, these little landmarks
in my hometown are also touchstones of memories.
But sadly, there's this one strip,
the scene at the very beginning
when I spy Natalie Portman coming through the crowd,
Spitalfields Market, has been completely demolished.
The shops have all gone, and it struck me the other day
how sad that was 'cause I have such vivid memories
of shooting that scene.
The play, those who know the play,
will know that the ending in the play is very different,
or at least it goes a little further,
and we filmed that ending.
Although it's quite an eccentric ending.
My character Dan calls the other two together
and has this breakdown where he describes
that Alice, Natalie's character, has died.
And he goes through this whole confessional
where he discovers that she's stolen her name
from the memorial of this young woman back
in the Victorian age.
They only way I could make sense of this scene
was to play it like he'd gone a little crazy,
and then they cut the scene, quite rightly.
The rhythm works much better the way it is,
but I've always [laughs] taken it
that it must be because I was really awful in this scene
'cause I do remember making quite a bold decision
to play him slightly wacky that he'd called these two people
together and was confessing something.
But hopefully, that's not the case.
[contemplative instrumental music]
I cry all the time.
- [Amanda] You do not.
- Yeah, I do.
- [laughs] You don't have to be this nice.
- It happens to be the truth.
- [laughs] Really? - Like a book,
a great film, a birthday card, I weep.
- [laughs] Shut up. - I'm a major weeper.
Of the films we've mentioned, The Holiday is one
that is reminded to me most often,
I guess because it's seasonal.
A lot of people come to me every year
and say oh, we watch that every holiday,
we watch that every Christmas.
That's our favorite Christmas film,
and there are a few funny memories I have of that.
The first is that we shot the exteriors in the UK first.
It was freezing.
For whatever reason, all the interiors, the UK interiors,
too, were filmed in the studios here in LA.
So we all moved to LA.
Nancy has the, oh, I don't know if she does it anymore,
but she has the reputation for taking her time.
I'm sat in my house, waiting for five weeks
before they get to me.
As you can probably see, if I look at the sun,
I go very brown very quickly.
My father is very dark skinned.
And if you watch that film carefully,
[laughs] when I'm outside in England,
I'm [laughs] really white and pasty.
Soon as I go inside, I'm like [snaps] hey,
and I've got this suntan. [laughs]
No one really notices, but if you watch, I darken by
about two shades every time I step inside and out.
I've worked with Kate three or four times,
and that was, I think, the second.
It was a wonderful time.
Our kids were both very little, and we would laugh a lot.
Getting to know Cameron was a great experience.
She's so much fun.
It was a very happy time.
It was hard work.
A lot of my scenes were with the kids.
We could only shoot with them till lunch,
so in the morning, I was behind the camera,
just trying to make these children laugh
and sticking dolls in my mouth,
pulling funny faces, and putting things on my head
to make them keep attention with me.
And then they would go at lunchtime,
and then you'd be exhausted.
It would be like you've
been running a crèche all morning, right?
And then they turn around, and they're like right,
you gotta do the same thing now!
And [laughs] I always remember being like, oh God.
Bring in a clown next time for the kids' closeups.
I think it was one of the first times I'd done an out
and out comedy.
Well, no, I'd done comedy, but I wanted to do it
because Nancy related it to some
of my favorite old rom coms.
She wanted it to be arsenic and old laced,
slightly goofy, funny but romantic and heartfelt.
And they're tricky, they're very technical.
A lot of it's rhythm.
And they always say, actually doing drama
is sometimes more fun than doing comedies.
In comedies, it's like do it again and be funny this time.
That's hard.
[light jazzy piano music]
That was my waistcoat.
- I thought we agreed it's too small for you.
- I'd like it back.
- I thought we agreed.
- I want it back.
[carriage rattling]
So Sherlock Holmes.
I get this phone call.
I just remember being really curious.
It was a part I never considered playing,
John Watson, Dr. Watson, Holmes.
But of course, they mentioned Downey and Guy
and this bizarre equation.
Suddenly, I thought, God, this could be disastrous
or this could be absolutely genius.
I spend this afternoon with Robert.
I really don't wanna be one of these actors
who just says ah, I just fell in love with this actor,
but honestly, me and [laughs] Robert fell
in love [laughs] this afternoon.
And we were like these children, giggling,
and we just had a very compatibility, I think,
that sense of humor, our view on the world.
He's the most brilliant, eccentric,
quick-witted, and lovely man.
You have to realize that Iron Man had only just come out.
In fact, I don't even know whether it had been released.
He'd shot it, and it was pretty obvious
what was gonna happen.
The whole thing became, honestly,
a really enjoyable experience.
We would run the pages in the morning,
improvise a whole bunch.
I kept this thing called the Bible,
which was all these quotes from the Conan Doyle books,
swap out lines that we'd improvised
with lines actually by Conan Doyle
and rewrite stuff, and then we'd go shoot it,
and we'd shoot it really quickly,
and obviously, alongside that,
there was all this incredible physical stuff,
stunts, horse riding, fights.
But it was a very happy, very, very happy job
and fun to be on a set that scale.
It had a lot of money behind it.
Guy runs a very happy set.
A lot of music being played.
I think while we were cooking that one,
we were already thinking about a second.
[light playful instrumental music]
This is the most complicated one I've ever seen by far.
Well, Hugo.
So I'd already worked with Marty on The Aviator.
To work with someone of his caliber
and import is just a dream come true, really.
So to be asked to go back and do it, play another part,
it was wonderful, a real compliment.
I read the book to my children.
It was a really important book, actually.
I read to my children.
I don't anymore, but I used to read
to my children all the time.
This particular book had a real impact on them
because there are pages of text,
and then there are all the wonderful illustrations
that go on for pages and pages and pages,
which you can interpret and where the story takes
on a dream quality that the children can comment on.
So I had a real attachment to it.
Just being able to sit back
and observe Martin Scorcese's energy on a set,
great way to learn and a great way to be inspired
about the art form passion he has.
The insight and the knowledge he has
of the history of film, it's really infectious.
Who's this interesting author?
I inquired of Monsieur John.
To my surprise, he was distinctly taken aback.
- Don't you know?
- [Jude] He asked.
- Don't you recognize him?
- Like so many other people, I had just been a huge fan
of Wes Anderson's for years and years,
right back to Bottle Rocket.
I would turn to his films like holidays.
Life Aquatic was a film I would disappear in,
and life always felt better in a Wes Anderson film,
even if you were going through a breakup.
There was just something about the aesthetic
and the worlds he created that you wanted
to be in, and I wrote to him.
It's just something I do quite a lot,
but I wrote to him just thanking him
and dropping huge hints that if he ever wanted to cast me,
[laughs] I'd be more than happy to work with him.
And we ended up meeting in a very Wes Anderson place.
We met for tea at Claridge's, and he quite rightly turned up
in a tweed suit and tie and slippers.
This is [laughs] a funny story, though.
He said, yeah, there is a part for you.
I'm gonna send you this script.
And the character is called the author.
So I turn the first page, and it says, first thing, author.
I'm like, oh my God, next page, author, author, author.
I'm thinking, oh my God, it's the lead.
Six pages in, [laughs] he goes, cut back 15 years.
I'm like aw, no!
Basically, I bookend it.
But [laughs] it was still a wonderful opportunity.
And I flew out to, oh, this little border town
up in the mountains of Germany and Poland, literally right.
I go running a lot, and I'd go running
in the morning when it wasn't.
We stayed, all of us together, in this little hotel
which they use in the film, and all the cast would stay
in there, and we'd all have dinner together at night.
We'd go and watch reference films
and what have you in Wes's suite,
and then they took over this old communist department store,
which became the lobby.
And one of my earliest memories of that
was they built a little gym for those
who wanted to use one, and I went in,
and I was training in the morning,
and [laughs] F Murray Abraham came in.
And he said do you mind if I warm up?
And I was like, come on, do we, and what I didn't realize,
he [laughs] was talking about vocally. [laughs]
So I'm silently doing sit ups,
and then I just hear
♪ Meh ♪
♪ Bup bup bup bup bup bup bup bup bup bup ♪
♪ Pome pome ♪
♪ Buh buh buh duh duh duh do do do bah duh duh bah ♪
And [laughing] he just stood there
because, of course, F Murray Abraham
has this incredible voice.
And so he was warming up vocally
while I'm [laughs] doing weights, going like this.
Fantastic.
[light bright piano music]
However long you keep me and my friends under surveillance,
you're not going to discover plots against you, Travis,
because we want the same thing, the defeat of Grindelwald.
I read my children Harry Potter, took them to see the films,
and I loved Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them.
I don't remember at what point, but someone suddenly said,
oh, they're gonna want a Dumbledore.
I went through an audition process,
and it was a process I hadn't don't in awhile,
and it was fun to do because you also felt
like you oughta make sure you were married to this part.
You didn't get it [laughs] and buckle
because there's a great responsibility
that comes with playing Albus Dumbledore.
I think one of the beautiful moments
in preparation was working with JK Rowling,
and I spent an afternoon
where she just gave me the entire history
of this great character.
And I remember I went in, and she was having tea.
She had these incredible heels on,
and she said, okay, she said,
if you don't mind, I'm gonna stand up.
And she stood up for nearly three hours
and just walked up and down, talk, talk, it just came out.
It's just living in her.
And I'm sitting there, scribbling down notes
and getting all this incredible insight into this character,
which I had a little opportunity to use in this current one.
And then next year, I go ahead, and we do another chapter,
so there's more to come with that.
There's something wonderful about embodying someone
with magical power,
trying to understand what that might be like,
but there's also something painful
about Albus, something sad.
Just a beautiful literary character
that was a real privilege to be able
to bring to life.
There are two of us, John.
You're gonna have to deal with me.
- There is no dealing with the devil.
You are a danger to others, a rash, unreasonable child.
It doesn't matter; I am the Pope.
- I was coming to the end of a job,
really trying to get a sense of what do I wanna do,
and who's out there, and what's happening?
And I'm one of these people.
I'm always making lists, and I try and see
as much as I can 'cause I'm also a big film fan.
I'd seen Il Divo, and I'd seen La Grande Bellezza,
and Paolo was absolutely at the top of this list.
And then you sit there thinking,
well, how do I make that work?
Maybe I need to learn Italian.
And I promise you, within a week,
a get a letter from Paolo, saying oh, I have an idea.
Will you meet me?
We sit down, and he's written this two-page document
about this young American pope who drinks Cherry Coke Zero
and smokes Marlboro Lights,
this conservative, dogmatic, terrifying reformist
who doesn't believe in God. [laughs]
I had to stop myself salivating, I think, in front of him.
He started writing, and this extraordinary web
of intrigue and character and politics
and social economic politics in the back rooms
of the Vatican started to come together.
And I started learning Latin.
That was my greatest fear with all the speeches in Latin.
I started learning those months before
because, well, I found them very hard to learn.
I do a lot of theater, so I don't find lines hard to learn,
but learning another, yeah, that was very hard.
It was an extraordinary experience living in Rome
for nine months, working with this team
who have made almost every film with Paolo
that worked like clockwork in silence around him.
It's like he's famous for these extraordinary set pieces,
but he comes on set, he makes his decision,
and there's no hanging around.
It's not like you sat waiting for him
to work it out or practice it hours on end.
It's a very swift process.
There was also a strange sense of zen
because 99% of the time, they were speaking Italian.
Lenny has this almost insular world that he operates from,
and so people speaking another language
around me helped me disappear into this world
and behind this veneer.
And I worked with this acting coach I've been working with
around 10 years, and she's always saying to me,
you are enough, you are enough.
And what she means by that is you do the work,
and you don't need to show everyone how hard you're working.
Some actors do, but I think it's more effective
when you do the work and you're just then present,
and Lenny was a real great opportunity
to put that to practice, to try and have faith
in stillness and faith in presence over projection.
Let the presence be the projection.
And then we had the keys to the city; it was extraordinary.
We were filming in palazzos and gardens
that no one ever gets to see.
They were like opening up treasure troves.
It was extraordinary to go to work everyday
and see these historical significant spaces
and wonders.
We completed it, and, to me, that was the beginning
and the end of Lenny Belardo.
And then, about seven months, eight months later,
Paolo calls me and says that he's got an idea
of maybe how to take the story further.
He told me that in Venice,
the day that we premiered The Young Pope,
and I would not have been interested
had it not been anything other, really, than what he's done.
I would consider myself an existentialist.
I was turned onto it first by David Cronenberg
when I made eXistenZ, and he turned me
onto Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, Camus.
What I realized was that it was a natural state of mind,
one that I'd been living in and by
since I was a teenager, really.
And it's this idea of taking responsibility
to try and live in the present.
It's like a faith in a way that I think you need
to mature because every time you shift in your life
or you take on board something else
or you have a new relationship or your world expands,
it needs applying to.
But I've always been intrigued by it,
and it's not something I necessarily conquered
or achieved, but it's something that I've been drawn to
and that I find spiritually fulfilling.
That's interesting.
I've not necessarily seen it that clearly in my work,
but I think you're right.
It's a good observation. [muffled speaking]
I'm thrilled you said that. [interviewer laughs]
I'm gonna steal it.
If ever asked to sum up my career, I'll say existentialist.
[interviewer laughs] [soft contemplative music]