Peter Mullan
Peter Mullan
Peter Mullan is a Scottish actor and filmmaker. He is best known for his role in Ken Loach's My Name Is Joe, for which he won Best Actor Award at 1998 Cannes Film Festival. He is also winner of the World Dramatic Special Jury Prize for Breakout Performances at 2011 Sundance Film Festival for his work on Paddy Considine's Tyrannosaur. Mullan appeared as supporting or guest actor in numerous cult movies, including Ken Loach's Riff-Raff, Mel Gibson's Braveheart, Danny Boyle's...
NationalityScottish
ProfessionMovie Actor
Date of Birth2 November 1959
I did 'Deathly Hallows' so my kids could get on the 'Harry Potter' set. They met Daniel Radcliffe, who was a darling and couldn't have been nicer to them so I'm a hero right now.
Just in relation to women, it's not that huge an imaginative leap to see the connection between the Taliban and the Catholic Church.
Nine out of ten delinquents are frustrated actors.
In the acting game, you spend a long time fighting against what the director perceives you to be. And half the time the directors don't know.
If I'm at home on my own and the writing isn't going well, I clean my house. And there have been times in the past few years when my house has looked really clean.
I find the world more absurd now than I did when I was a kid.
Watching people just look out for themselves, I think, is extremely interesting. It goes right back to something like 'The Beggar's Opera' - the underbelly of society, how it operates, and how that reflects their so-called betters.
It's not so much that I want to direct but that I have to. When I write something it terrifies me that if I give it to someone else and it doesn't turn out as it could have done, I'd feel as if I'd orphaned my baby.
Sometimes you have to confront your demons and sometimes even let them loose to genuinely find a place where you can gain some understanding.
In bringing the subject of religious oppression to a wider audience, I didn't just want to kick the Catholic Church but to poke a finger in the throat of theocracy and to let it be known that people shouldn't tolerate this anymore.
There are some people who walk into a room and they oxygenate it, by their very being there's fresh air. Then there are those who come in with the smell of death and they suck the life out.
Every film I've ever worked on, and that includes 'Braveheart' and 'Trainspotting,' I've always witnessed a director having a breakdown. Every director will have a day, without exception, where they just can't do it anymore, they don't know what to say to their cameraman, their cast. It's the sign of real, physical exhaustion.
When things are really painful, I turn it into comedy.
Filmmaking is something I have to do. It's not something I particularly want to do.