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- I wanna talk about at this, sorta the weight
of some of these projects.
Can you talk about sort of,
being in what is a really sort of challenging,
sometimes unhappy place with a character?
- Yeah. At the end of Bodyguard I was like
I need to stop.
I need to stop doing this for a while
because it weighed very heavy on me.
I was very isolated during it.
And you spend more time in someone else's clothes
saying someone else's words, thinking
someone else's thoughts that
you do lose a bit of yourself and I'm not
a method actor in any way but you
get a huge hangover from this.
And at the end of that I felt very isolated and broken,
much like the character was
and physically and mentally just exhausted
and at the end I was just trying to survive
getting through the last bit of filming.
- Sure.
Can you talk a little bit about the preparation process?
I mean, I know you had consultants
as part of this project, but one of the things you
have said is that people don't necessarily
wanna talk about this with PTSD,
and what that looks like and how that weighs on you.
How do you then prepare to take that on as an actor?
- I kinda did a lot of,
I spoke to a few soldiers which is tough
because they really don't wanna talk about it.
People don't wanna discuss this
at all.
I looked a lot at what I'd seen in film an television
and then I tried to work out where I was gonna be
honest within this character.
This ...
It's something that people live with everyday.
It can be a really, just trickling level of anxiety
you constantly live with, or paranoia, or panic attacks, or
lots of things that lots of other people suffer with.
I think it was tapping into those elements
and trying to humanize it
within someone who is in complete denial about it.
I just tried to find his honesty
and luckily I had writing and a brilliant writer
that helped bring out, and helped me understand
this man.
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- What were the sort of, most challenging, sorta,
points in your careers and
how did you turn it around?
Or decide, I'm just gonna keep going
and obviously it did turn around
'cause here you all are.
Was there a low period that,
or dark period where ya had to
climb out? - I think it's that being
picky when you're broke because there's that ...
Turning down a job when you've not got another job lined up
in the hope that something good's gonna happen.
And I did a spell, I did,
11 months where I was broke and I had nothing
and was turning down theater gigs,
small theater gigs because I wanted to try and
be doing some camera acting.
I wanted to get into that, I wanted to get better at that.
And getting to that point of being like,
I've no ...
The offers stop coming after you turn them down for awhile.
And then you go like,
I've now ruined that bit of my career.
I can't go back there,
and I'm not getting the camera stuff
and maybe I've just screwed it up completely
and I'm kinda, I'm lost now.
Shot myself in the foot by being too ambitious
to learn more,
and to move forwards with things.
And then I did get Game of Thrones
and that helped change things a bit.
(people laughing)
- [Woman] That'll do it. That little show.
- But that was and advance from my agent
to stay in London for the next two months
until I started shooting that.
I mean I've not, I think I've been very, very, very lucky
in terms of working in low points.
I think we all kind of have them and questioned what we're,
we're doing, but I feel very lucky to have not
had that as low as a lot of other actors.
I'm grateful for that, I'm aware of it.
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- At the stages of your careers that you
are all currently in,
what're the roles your sort of either already tired of or
just tired of being approached for?
- I played Romeo for about ten years
(people chuckle) in different ways.
I literally played it when I was 21,
and when I was 30, and I'm like
yeah, I'm done.
- [Interviewer] Checked that box.
- I've checked that box kind of thing.
I think I'm done playing lots of good guys
that bad things happen to.
I've done lots of that so I'm kind of interested to
do less of Romeo, I think.
- I feel like you
shouldn't have perhaps gone through too,
and all of a sudden your name, I mean,
you click on, you google your name
and it's with Bond rumors and ...
- Never do that, never google your name.
- How do you sort of navigate your choices in all of that,
and perhaps tune it out if you need to tune it out?
- I think I was never more confident
when I had no success
because I had nothing to lose.
It gets harder and harder to fail.
You get more terrified of failing when,
when you've got something to lose
and I think that's just part of it.
I'm gonna ...
Do some good things, I hope,
and I'm probably gonna do some shit things too
and it's just gonna be the journey of it.
I'm gonna learn all the way through it
and try not, take each one as
this needs to be it,
then it needs to be this, then it needs to be this.
I think I need to kind of try and
relax a bit more on the journey of
- Sure. - Succeeding and failing
'cause I think you learn,
I learned a hell of a lot more when I'm failing, I think.
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