I come from an Irish Catholic family, and hell-raising is part of the DNA.

I'm from an Irish Catholic family.

No one would ever cast me as an aristocrat. I think the big thing about being an Irish artist is access to melancholy. Especially the American Irish. The availability of loss, some kind of pain, is an important part of who we are. I think my Irishness gave me that.

If you're sixty-something, pushing 70, the chances of you getting a tremendously fascinating part in the movies are very low, as to be almost negligible, or even in television. But in the theatre, there are still things to do, very interesting, very profound things.

I remember playing John Wayne Gacy, serial killer, very sick, neurotic, screwed-up guy. You know what? There's a part of me there, too, and you explore that.

It'd be very difficult to cast me as a ballet dancer. Everybody is, in some sense, controlled by their size and their gender. I'm not going to be allowed to play the part that Denzel Washington plays.