Ed Speleers Quotations

I've wanted to be an actor for such a long time that I haven't had anything else in my thoughts. I think my family would have quite liked me to be a lawyer.

Education never really interested me, to be fair. I mean, education does interest me, but academic school study is a different thing. I can't quite grasp that.

I was a mixture of a country boy and a town boy, really. Chichester is a town on the coast of England, and I grew up all along that strip of coast that Chichester branches out into. Sometimes I was living in a house in the country, and sometimes I was living in a town.

I don't think I'm ugly, but I never thought I was that special.

I never went to stage school or anything like that. It was always plays, productions at school and things like that. The thing for me with acting was it was the only thing I could fully concentrate on. I loved playing sports. I didn't really love studying.

My job isn't about pursuing fame and then becoming an actor. It's about becoming an actor, and if fame follows suit, that's fine.

There are so many great actors, but I really have a lot of respect for Johnny Depp. I've seen a lot of movies with him in it and, even if it's a film that wasn't as successful as you thought it would be, I've never seen him put in a bad performance. My favorite actors from history have to be Steve McQueen and James Dean.

I'm a big fan of British cinema; I think we make some unbelievably brilliant films, but they can quite often have a dark feel.

The first drama thing I really got stuck into was 'A Midsummer Night's Dream.' I played Puck. That's when I said, 'I want to be an actor.'

I like going to see live bands. Live bands can be quite heavy, but I think it's very relaxing at the same time because you feel so happy and chilled-out.

I think it's really important whilst you're a young actor to try as many new things as possible... to try and do something you haven't necessarily been seen doing before.

If I look at the people that I look up to, a lot of them don't come to the forefront until their early to mid-30s. I think the most exciting roles are definitely yet to come.

People have interesting things to say and you're only going to learn from different people's experience and knowledge.

I think I was shown Pulp Fiction and Goodfellas at seven or eight. That's really bad. I think I've turned out all right; it didn't harm me too much.

When I'm putting the character together I try to find music that I think fits the character...

I did listen to 1920s jazz or Al Johnson and a lot of early singers coming out of England. I would branch out a little bit to get a sense of the world that he might be coming into, in the '30s when jazz was changing.

From a stupidly young age I was always involved in anything, whether it be a nativity play or little kids plays. Wherever it was, I was involved and I think it was because more than anything, I wanted to be the center of attention.

I've got to give my brother a lot of credit because he's always introduced me to a lot of things and those films spiked an interest of, "Wow, this is an incredible world, how do you be a part of that?" That definitely helped me through my school years of doing theater.

I've always loved [acting] and I've always wanted to [do it] from as far back as I can remember.

I can get quite down on myself because if people don't like what you're doing, it's hard.

Comedy is not something that had necessarily jumped out as something I'd immediately go for.

I want to go to the extremes and transformation is something I'm fascinated by. At the same time, you can transform but you can only really put what you've got inside you into somebody, so there's always going to be a degree of you inhabiting any role.

A challenge is always important; as an actor, as a human, it's good to face challenges and it's good to push your boundaries.

It's funny because growing up, when Ali G first burst off the screen, it was something that I was probably too young to be watching, but I absolutely loved it...

If you can have a show that has quite strong morals and cover important themes but be able to put them out to a broad audience, that's an interesting thing.

I want to be 82 and doing movies with Paolo Sorrentino where people are like, "This is gold."

I really do consider myself quite fledgling in my acting career. I've only been doing it for 10 years and that's a short amount of time, really.

I'm not good at just sitting around waiting for the phone to ring, hoping that the perfect role is going to turn up.

There are a lot of great young actors coming out of England who have maybe not gone to drama school, but I wish I had.

What I like doing these days is spending more time with coaches because I think it's important to work on yourself.

A lot of the time when you're doing your own work, it's all in your own head, which can be frustrating if you're prepping for something, especially an audition where it's all in your brain and you go in and no one else has seen it and you don't really know how it fits.

Music was a big thing for me growing up and Scorsese and Tarantino both use music brilliantly in movies. They're probably two of the best at using music.

There's a lot of content out there that's for an older audience but what struck me was that people who like those grittier, slightly punchier shows could still watch this but with their children as well.