James Purefoy
Violence is a very ugly thing. Violence is often so casual on film, and made to look so cool and so sexy, but violence is a repulsive, repugnant act that human beings inflict on each other. It shouldn't seem to be cool and sexy, ever really.Collection: Cool
I have to travel a lot for work.Collection: Travel
Decide very early on: do you want to be an actor or do you want to be famous? Because they're very different routes.Collection: Famous
The first time I was ever on stage, I was naked at 17. It was very cold!
Joe Carroll had a certain black comedy to him. But I think it's lovely playing a man who, in his heart and soul, is a gentle man. And he's wounded and complicated.
My pub was full of get-rich-quick schemes that never worked - scams, pyramid schemes. People trying to find a way to get themselves out of a rut.
I'm not a big fan of patterns. I like the unexpected.
I have no problem with television as a genre.
There are only a few TV networks that really invest in production in the way that I think they should. HBO, obviously, is one of them.
One of the great things about being an actor is that you have a completely different challenge every few months.
I really do want to just be able to sit in the corner of the pub with my friends... to just be an actor and still go to the supermarket and not get bothered.
If you find yourself always playing the villain, or if you find yourself being typecast into a corner where you're not happy then that's probably rather miserable, but if I have been typecast I am quite happy about it.
I think the older I get, the less I should be doing.
I do live a weirdly divided life, because I'm not a Hollywood superstar, I don't live on Malibu Beach, I don't do massive 'OK!' spreads, I don't go to premieres and parties that much.
Somerset is where I call home, and where I feel most myself.
Hospitals are very extreme places - you can be in a maternity room one minute, and by someone's bedside as they're dying the next.
I really like playing people who are exciting to watch and who burn brightly.
Ring tones are just irritating, aren't they?
As an actor you have to get used to receiving gentle little pies in the face.
I was very unmotivated at school.
When I started acting, I used to read all the reviews.
One of the things I like about doing historical films is drawing the line between now and then.
If you look around us, there are an awful lot of men out there, and women, but mostly men, who believe that they have got a fast-track path to Heaven, if they do the things that they believe God is telling them to do, and I don't just mean Islamic people. I mean Fundamentalist Christians.
I'm on record saying that HBO is the best television company in the world, and I believe they are. I think they absolutely understand how to make television that is really, really vital and interesting and visceral, and all the things that television really should be.
British actors are pretty good, by and large, at turning on at 'action' and off at 'cut.'
You know, people aren't watching a network: they're watching cable channels.
When you're unhappy, you tend to play up, don't you?
Dieting isn't complicated: if you eat 2,000 calories, you have to burn it off; simple as that.
I love all things Apple and have done since 1996.
I think the business affairs people at the studios get some kind of perverse satisfaction in finding the worst hotels for actors to stay in.
Airport security is a particular bugbear. At the risk of sounding like a grumpy old man, while I can see that averting terrorism is manifestly important, the measures taken seem, simultaneously, absurd.
Ancient Rome was a violent place.
I'm a serial monogamist.
Acting is a way to escape who you are for a short period of time. It doesn't happen all the time , but every now and then, the sensation of being 'other' is very profound. You get this moment where you are no longer yourself. You lose consciousness of the crew or the audience... it's a thrilling moment. And even quite spiritual.
As you mature and gain a semblance of wisdom and a sense of what life is all about... this is by no means true of everyone, but a lot of actors like to escape themselves. Inhabiting another person's persona is often a good way of escaping yourself.
I wasn't accepted the first time I tried to get into drama school. I said, 'I'll give this one more shot... and if that doesn't work, I won't bang my head against this painful brick wall.'
When you don't take what you have for granted, you constantly try to re-prove yourself to yourself rather than to other people.
I wanted somebody who had a heart and a soul, because Joe Carroll is soulless. There was nothing in there. He was a vacuum of a man.
When I was growing up, 'Butch and Sundance' was my absolute favorite film.
I grew up in a very rural community in England.
We always have relationships in our lives with people we've fallen in love with, who come back into our lives, and we fall in love with them again and go, 'I shouldn't be doing this,' but you can't stop it.
A voice and an accent are two very different things. The voice of a man is how he speaks from his heart, right in the middle of him... And then you stick an accent on top of that.
You were always told that if you worked hard, you would get somewhere. But so many people feel they have worked hard and they have nothing to show for it.
The East Texas accent is a famously difficult accent to do.
I do know Joe Lansdale has the most extraordinary voice you've ever heard in your life in terms of an accent that, when I started doing it, they had to go, 'Whoa, we need less.' But that's how he talks.
I ran into my old friend Michael Kenneth Williams, who I worked with on a show called 'The Philanthropist' for NBC. He was going to be doing this show called 'Hap and Leonard.' He was playing Leonard, and they were looking for somebody to play Hap.
Playing Mark Antony in 'Rome' will always be a favourite of mine because he was such an outrageously big and interesting character to play. Also, the fact that we were able, with that character, to find out and present the public with a biography of that man that had not been really seen before.
We shot the first season of 'Hap and Leonard' towards the end of the summer in Louisiana, in and around Baton Rouge. If anyone's been to Louisiana or comes from Louisiana, they know what the weather's like down there at that time of year: it's unbearably hot for an Englishman.
When you sign up for a show in the United States, it's six or seven years, generally speaking.
If you read Grimm's fairy tales, they're absolutely terrifying.