Quotes by Robert Carlyle

“I want to keep audiences off balance, so they dont know who I am or how to take me. If I duck and weave, as Frank Bruno might say, Ill have a longer shelf life.”

“We met in Cracker. I played a maniac fan who murders a policeman and she did my makeup. I thought anyone interested in me looking like that must have genuinely liked me.”

“The way a person moves tells you a lot about them. Look at the way Im holding this coffee mug. If I were to thump it down on the table, I wouldnt be respecting your tape recorder. If I move it gently, it means I am showing some respect. These are the things I bring to my performances.”

“To be honest Ive worked with a few American actors now and I was looking forward to that you know, coming up in my career thinking Yeah Id like to work with some Americans because they seem to be very, very comfortable with improvisation. But that has not been my experience at all. They have to have things absolutely set.”

“I must have been dreaming about Albie. I spoke in a Liverpool accent all the time. It becomes second nature. Its much easier like that. It seems to me common sense rather than extraordinary.”

“I feel with TV youre allowed more freedom. With television theres more time to create something through the episodes. The fact that youre working harder on the surface seems more difficult, but you get into a way of working where if youre not allowed to stop and breathe and think about it, you just go on instinctively, which is the way I prefer anyway. It becomes a more spontaneous thing.”

“Acting is probably the greatest therapy in the world. You can get a lot stuff out of you on the set so you dont have to take it home with you at night. Its the stuff between the lines, the empty space between those lines which is interesting.”

“Ill spare you the actors pretentious rubbish, but a face reflects experience, so if you concentrate on a character something happens to you physically. Many actors look at the costume before the part, and that seems crazy to me. Its much more fun to be ugly. Not that I think Im ugly, but Ive never considered myself good-looking.”

“A lot of the characters I play come from the working-class. Its a background Im familiar with. Its not about being hard. Its just knowing how that society works and what the rules are.I grew up in a working-class area of Glasgow and that experience has stood me in good stead.”

“Im in four different films this year, and I have four different accents. I sound different in every film. You have to love a character to play it well, and change in my work is what I want.”

In the late 70s, maybe just before I started, there was still an attitude that if you did film you didnt do TV and vice versa, but thats gone now.

I love sci-fi because it leads in the imagination, and I always say it has the most intelligent fans in the world.