Acting is way of making yourself exist.
Actors, the good actors, always want to talk about what they're doing, always want to give other people space to do what they're doing.
And I remember being knocked out by The Butcher Boy. My first experience of it was in New York when Patrick McCabe read extracts from it.
Angel was the first Irish feature film. Neil's first movie and my first movie.
At least when you're acting you can be someone. In front of the camera you have to be yourself. And who am I?
At this moment, when Ireland seems about to break into something new, we thought it was worth looking back at a time when people seemed to have found a way out of the sectarian division of the country.
I always wanted to be in movies but could never figure out a way of getting into them. There were none being made in Ireland at that time.
I am afraid of death, scared by it. I already don't know whether I exist or not. So dying really terrifies me.
I believe some people in this business suffer from fame because they behave in a famous fashion.
I could not imagine being without the freedom to go where I want and do what I want.
I did his first movie and it was my first movie. It was at a time in Ireland, 1982, where it was miraculous that we were doing a movie at all. There just was no industry at all. I don't know if that bonded us but I have a feeling for his material. I think his work is very interesting.
I didn't want to be seen as just a guy on a list. I'm interested in good scripts, scripts that are about something, scripts that move your acting along.
I don't feel ashamed of my wife's political background, and I don't think she should either. I feel that the people who administered the North of Ireland for the last 20 years should be ashamed. There you are.
I have never been to a brothel. I don't think I could go into one.
I think great art is always ambiguous and can't be pinned down.
I'm arrogant enough to think I've done a lot for the film, but it's completely Neil.
I'm enjoying it, but I still don't know why I'm hooked on acting.
I've been worked over by the English press because there's an assumption that my politics are identical with my wife's, and for that matter that my wife's politics are identical with her politics of 20 years ago.
I've never been in a bad play. There might have been bad productions and I might have been bad in them, but I've never been in a play that wasn't interesting or worthwhile doing on some level.
I've sat around in rooms with Brian Friel, Seamus Heaney, Seamus Deane, Tom Paulin. It was a modern day salon of ideas. They were ordinary lads, but they said some profound things.
My kids act all the time and it's exactly what I used to do.
Neil does great stuff and I love working with him, but I can't just rely on that.
People ask me to smile for the camera, but somehow it always comes out gloomy.
People often refer to my career before The Crying Game as something which led up to that point. But I was very fulfilled in what I was doing.
That was the beginning of modern acting for me. You don't have to tell a camera everything. It gets bored if you do and wants to look elsewhere.
The Butcher Boy is a very great novel indeed and a very important Irish novel. The ambiguity of that is, he's writing a book about an appalling situation and he does it in a hilarious way.
The End of the Affair is a good movie because it about things, things that really matter. Love, sex, death. Have you ever seen romance?
The worst thing for an actor is a director that gets on your nerves and says things that actually confuse you.
They do say this thing about me being... hangdog, melancholy. It drives me insane.
With Field Day, we'd often play places where they hadn't seen professional actors in 30 years. Everyone in the community would come and see you.
You have to know who you are, if you don't you have nightmares.
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