Explore Quotes by Mark Strong

As an actor, that's what you want. You want variety. I want to try things that I'm not used to and push my own envelope and see what I'm capable of.

I've pretty much played every regional accent you can play in the U.K. I've played German, French, Arabic; I've been Jordanian, Lebanese. I've covered a lot of ground.

The person I respect most, in terms of historical figures, is probably Nelson Mandela. I just think that his tolerance in the face of extreme provocation is something every single person on the planet could learn from.

I'm like anyone; I make a lot of my assumptions about actors I don't know from what I read about them. And then I'll find those judgments are often completely confounded when I meet them in real life.

I was born in London, and my family is here. America is an interesting place, but it's incredibly different culturally. It doesn't take long being there before I want to get back.

My genes are such that I've always been relatively in shape.

When you're making a psychological thriller, what you need to do is have an audience on shifting sand so they're never quite sure where they are.

You sign for a sequel for everything these days, just in case, options. In the past, you avoided them like the plague because it meant somewhere down the road you couldn't take a job because you had to do a sequel. Now it's a feature of pretty much any feature you do.

If you think about Shakespeare, you remember Richard III and Macbeth before you remember Ferdinand, whose role is just to fall in love and be a bit of a wimp. I love the baddies. More important, though, is making the baddies somehow, weirdly, understood.

I had this extraordinarily bizarre moment when, two Fridays ago, my missus gave birth to our second child at 11am and by the same time the following day I was sitting around a table with Ridley Scott, Russell Crowe and Leonardo DiCaprio in Rabat in Morocco, rehearsing a scene we were going to shoot the next day.

I do get antsy if I haven't got lines to learn, a character to play. But yes, I do take holidays.

I'm sure, in real life, spying is boring - there's probably a lot of sitting around and plenty of paperwork. But the world seems to think that spying is exciting, and that's how movies get made.

You come out of drama school and do theatre and are interested in creative endeavour, then you drift into TV and movies and realise that artistic endeavour needs to balance with financial success. There's no point spending millions on a movie that doesn't make any money, because the people producing it won't make another one.

It's always interesting when you play a part and then suddenly people think you're an authority on the subject.

I'm going to try to play some good guys for a while and just see how that is. It's hard to enjoy them as much as the bad guys, and the clothes are nowhere near as good. Good guys don't wear nice suits!

As an only child, particularly if you're a boy without a father, you have to work out for yourself who you're going to be. And I do think, over the years, I've developed a need for control.

Funnily enough, I had a real giggle with Gary Oldman when we were doing an interview together for 'Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.' Because I joked I was probably the only British actor who wasn't in the 'Harry Potter' franchise. The same is true of 'Game of Thrones.' Also 'Star Wars.'

My style icon has always been David Bowie. Just because of the variety of images and looks he created.

I can't imagine anything worse than being in a position that you're not allowed to live your life privately.

I've never been one of those actors who plays chess with his career and goes, 'I'm going to wait now and see what project comes up that can move me to this or that level.' I take stuff as it comes, and it just so happens that it hasn't dried up yet, touch wood.

The fact that women are constantly supposed to be beautiful, gorgeous, and perfect all the time is something they have always had to live with. But now it's happening to men, too. There seems to be this imperative that you have to be hot or ripped or fit or healthy or whatever you want to call it.