Rhys Ifans
All punk rockers hate Christmas.Collection: Christmas
As an actor, our very palette is one of imagination. So it is a walk onto an empty space and then imagine the world beyond it is what we do.Collection: Imagination
You look at any culture, and prohibition has invariably been an unmitigated failure. It is just idiotic to criminalise any substance, I think.Collection: Failure
If it is not scary, it is not worth doing.
Every time the Tories get a bit of power, they rip off all the things I love... The mining industry. Milk.
I've had the longest mid-life crisis ever.
I work hard and I party hard. When I go to work, I know what I am doing and I do it to the best of my abilities. When I party, I take exactly the same rule book with me.
I've done a lot of Shakespeare onstage, and I'm not convinced that the Earl of Oxford was the author of all those works, but I am convinced that the Stratfordian William Shakespeare was not. My feeling is that it was an amalgamation of many writers, in the same way that most films are a collaborative endeavor.
My personal life is invented for me, so why bother?
I play really bad punk rock guitar.
I am an artisan. I only became an artist when people watch what I do. That is when it becomes art.
I'll move back to Wales if and when I have children. I want them to speak the language I speak, but I love living in London. It's my favourite city in the whole world. I love it because it's not England, it's London.
I'm always flabbergasted and overwhelmed by the audience a film reaches.
Shyness is invariably a suppression of something. It's almost a fear of what you're capable of.
I come from a culture where the pub is the centre of the community. The pub is the Internet. It's where information is gathered, collated and addressed.
The whole film genre is one of deceit. It is the suspension of disbelief. That's what all theater and all film is based on.
In Wales, singing and storytelling are party skills, not professions.
I think that all great art never strives to answer any questions; it just asks the appropriate ones at the appropriate time.
As a Welsh speaker, I'm very conscious of how activism can effect real change.
The war on drugs is being lost on a daily basis.
There is no such thing as a criminal life. Life is life, and life is criminalized. No one ever, in the history of life, has chosen a criminal life. No one has ever said, 'I want to be a criminal.' No one ever has done that.
Welsh women aren't the most tactile unless they're your relatives. And then you don't want them to be.
Film and stage are very different; I don't necessarily prefer one over the other. Every few years, I get a big itch to go back to the theater. To learn humility, to learn bravery and to remind yourself that the pistons that drive your craft are working on full power. And to remind yourself how badly paid actors can be.
I'm Welsh. We didn't do 'Peter Pan.' We have far more ancient legends to be put to sleep with.
If I'd been a rock star, I'd probably now be dead.
My work is my way of expressing myself without being arrested.
I freely admit that I am a bit of a misfit.
It is joyous for any actor to enter other grounds of consciousness and thought. At the end of the day, we just all like dressing up and playing around.
Well, I need to be frightened on a regular basis.
Don't be late. Learn your lines. Be good to people. Treat people nice.
There's two kinds of rock n' roll casualty: the one that has huge success and adoration, and then suddenly it stops. Or there's when you're in a band: it is all-consuming, so then you have the dream of that, and then the dream's taken away from you even before it happens.
It's like a badge of honour if you're a British actor and you get the 'Harry Potter' call. It meant a lot to me.
I never thought I would be in a film.
In a sense, I feel a lot more an outsider in Los Angeles than I did in Newfoundland.
I've worked with Hollywood stars, but the reason most of the Hollywood stars I've worked with are Hollywood stars is that they're excellent actors, so I've been very lucky.
I went to the Guilford School of Music and Drama, which was affiliated with the Royal Shakespeare Company. I was lucky enough to be taught by a beautiful, wonderful teacher called Patsy Rodenberg, who works a lot with the Royal Shakespeare Company as a voice coach and technician.
When I was taught Shakespeare in school, it was such an alien, sanitized puzzle, it made no sense.
I don't do celebrity.
I'm a factory-floor actor: I learn the lines, I get there on time.
I don't sit around with other actors and talk about the pain and the magic of acting.
People say: 'Oh, it's only acting,' but it's not ever just acting. At least not with me.
Whereas Superman is a godlike guy from another planet and Batman is this mysterious, unknowable billionaire, everyone in 'Spider-Man' is human and flawed.
I am not gadgety at all. It's not that I'm appalled by technology, but I've taken my time acquiring any of it.
Howard Marks is a great friend and a great Welshman.
I'm a passionate Welshman. I have a culinary relationship with language: I taste what I say because I have two languages, and each informs the other.
When you act, you've got to be like a poet or a musician. It's not about evidence before court. It's not a forensic subject. It's poetry; it's a completely different place.
I never think career.
If you had to find a period in history that would equate to what the Internet has presented us with now, it would be Elizabethan England. It was a world in flux.
We're in an age of enlightenment, and we have a choice as a society which path to take.
It's a great life being an actor, and I wouldn't change it for anything.