Mark Strong
Mark Strong
Mark Strongis an English theatre, film and television actor. He is known for his role in the television series Our Friends in the North and films such as Syriana, RocknRolla, Body of Lies, The Young Victoria, Sherlock Holmes, Robin Hood, Kick-Ass, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Green Lantern, Zero Dark Thirty, John Carter, Mindscape, The Imitation Game, and Kingsman: The Secret Service...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionMovie Actor
Date of Birth5 August 1963
couple crazy secret
The Secret Service I'm really excited about because Matthew Vaughn directed it. I've done a couple of movies with him - Stardust, which is one of my favorite films, and Kick-Ass, which is just a crazy, wonderful movie.
never-quit shifting needs
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.
daughter mother falling-in-love
You need to try to find a way to humanize your villains. Genuine villains, in real life, still have mothers and daughters and sisters, and they fall in love. They don't walk around with a big sign saying, "Bad guy," on their head. They think they're good guys. If you can play that, I think it makes it more interesting.
jobs past these-days
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.
fighting blow two
All these portrayals we see of knights fighting must be absolute rubbish because knights in armour could literally have only had two or three blows and then they'd have had to sit down to have a cup of tea.
successful black-and-white thinking
I've played lots of villains in my time and I think the reason they've been so successful is that they're not two-dimensional. They're not black and white. That's the gig.
children thinking years
And I think in your 40s, you land a little bit, physically and mentally, you arrive at a place where you feel you've learned some stuff. Having children at that point meant I had something very useful to do for the next 20 years.
friday children two
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.
past can-not feels
In the past, if I didn't work, I didn't eat but now I feel I can not work and I won't starve.
next-week ideas scripts
Part of me was fascinated by the idea that I would only get next week's episode a week in advance and wouldn't actually know where I was going with it, until the script landed on my mat. But, part of me wanted to know what was going to happen.
ideas acting transformation
The idea of transformation - playing something I'm not - is the bit I enjoy most about acting.
children kind realizing
Because I had children relatively late - in my 40s rather than in my 20s - it wasn't anything I ever knew that I would do. It kind of happened to me: I met the right woman and we had children. It was a revelation because it suddenly makes me realize, 'Oh, I get it. Now I know what to do with the rest of my life.
falling-in-love thinking important
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.
character thinking wow
I'm not a writer, inherently. Most of the writers I've met have stories they need to tell. I don't have that. I'm an interpreter. I like getting a script, seeing a character and thinking, "Oh, wow, I know what I can do with that."