Rhys Ifans Quotations

When you act, you've got to be like a poet or a musician. It's not about evidence before court. It's not a forensic subject. It's poetry; it's a completely different place.

I am an artisan. I only became an artist when people watch what I do. That is when it becomes art.

I've reached a point in my career when I can demand certain conditions, and one of them is a weekend break every three weeks during the shoot.

My personal life is invented for me, so why bother?

I honed my passion for acting in theatre and education, and I think it's important not to belittle the child audience.

Shyness is invariably a suppression of something. It's almost a fear of what you're capable of.

I am essentially very shy. Which, I guess, is why I'm very good at not being shy.

I work hard and I party hard. When I go to work, I know what I am doing and I do it to the best of my abilities. When I party, I take exactly the same rule book with me.

There's two kinds of rock n' roll casualty: the one that has huge success and adoration, and then suddenly it stops. Or there's when you're in a band: it is all-consuming, so then you have the dream of that, and then the dream's taken away from you even before it happens.

It is joyous for any actor to enter other grounds of consciousness and thought. At the end of the day, we just all like dressing up and playing around.

You look at any culture, and prohibition has invariably been an unmitigated failure. It is just idiotic to criminalise any substance, I think.

Welsh women aren't the most tactile unless they're your relatives. And then you don't want them to be.

The war on drugs is being lost on a daily basis.

Film and stage are very different; I don't necessarily prefer one over the other. Every few years, I get a big itch to go back to the theater. To learn humility, to learn bravery and to remind yourself that the pistons that drive your craft are working on full power. And to remind yourself how badly paid actors can be.

I come from a culture where the pub is the centre of the community. The pub is the Internet. It's where information is gathered, collated and addressed.

Whereas Superman is a godlike guy from another planet and Batman is this mysterious, unknowable billionaire, everyone in 'Spider-Man' is human and flawed.

If you had to find a period in history that would equate to what the Internet has presented us with now, it would be Elizabethan England. It was a world in flux.

I freely admit that I am a bit of a misfit.

In Wales, singing and storytelling are party skills, not professions.

My work is my way of expressing myself without being arrested.

I'm always flabbergasted and overwhelmed by the audience a film reaches.

Acting is not an intellectual process for me. It comes from my heart. It's this strange netherworld of osmosis where I simply become.

After you have been incarcerated for so long, whatever story is told in the aftermath is beautiful.

As a Welsh speaker, I'm very conscious of how activism can effect real change.

We're in an age of enlightenment, and we have a choice as a society which path to take.

When I'm not filming, I do rock n' roll; when I'm not doing rock n' roll, I do filming.

On a conventional film, you do one take, and if it's good, they say, 'Let's do another one for insurance.'

More than any other super-hero, 'Spider-Man' presents us with something very local in its ethics. It's not messianic. It's far more tangible.

I go to work, and I work very hard. I'm loyal, generous, true, kind, fair - all those boxes are ticked. I'm going to Heaven.

I don't have a problem with green screen at all. I think children invented CGI. We invent worlds. A stick can become a sword. Or a bowl of stones can become a bowl of tomatoes. That's what children do, and that's what CGI enables us to do.

I'm a real magpie when it comes to music; it's all random, and there's no pattern to what I like.

I don't sit around with other actors and talk about the pain and the magic of acting.

There aren't many odysseys in cinema for characters.

I think that all great art never strives to answer any questions; it just asks the appropriate ones at the appropriate time.

I think that Liverpool's particular modern history lends itself to the cinema better than London in many ways. When you go to Liverpool, you absorb that whole sound and humour.

I went to the Guilford School of Music and Drama, which was affiliated with the Royal Shakespeare Company. I was lucky enough to be taught by a beautiful, wonderful teacher called Patsy Rodenberg, who works a lot with the Royal Shakespeare Company as a voice coach and technician.

Spider-Man is a school boy that's looking for his parents.

I think Liverpool generates generosity which rubs off - it's a good place to work and to party.

Well, I need to be frightened on a regular basis.

You know you are in a good film when it affects the audience.

When I was young, I was in a hurry to live. And now I'm just not in a hurry.

There is no such thing as a criminal life. Life is life, and life is criminalized. No one ever, in the history of life, has chosen a criminal life. No one has ever said, 'I want to be a criminal.' No one ever has done that.

When I was taught Shakespeare in school, it was such an alien, sanitized puzzle, it made no sense.

What was extraordinary about Occupy London was that it was a village with a louder voice than one of the biggest cities of the world.

Very often, actors have to face being rejected time and again, and we must remember that the red carpet lasts just a minute.

Villains are fun. I think the important thing in playing them is that they don't see themselves as villains. It lets you be a little more expansive.

Each generation needs a 'Spider-Man' to mirror their angst.

Every time the Tories get a bit of power, they rip off all the things I love... The mining industry. Milk.

I've worked with Hollywood stars, but the reason most of the Hollywood stars I've worked with are Hollywood stars is that they're excellent actors, so I've been very lucky.

The strange thing is, if I was speaking to drama students about the thing that you should do if you're lucky enough to know or to meet the character that you're playing, I'd say, 'It's obvious: you quiz them diligently about their experience.'

People say: 'Oh, it's only acting,' but it's not ever just acting. At least not with me.

The older I get, I'm really reminded how important the arts are to our wellbeing as a society.

Acting is a tough, difficult job with long unsociable hours, although it can be a brilliant job, too. I don't want to complain too much, as nurses, farmers and teachers are out working long hours.

As an actor, our very palette is one of imagination. So it is a walk onto an empty space and then imagine the world beyond it is what we do.

The whole film genre is one of deceit. It is the suspension of disbelief. That's what all theater and all film is based on.

It's every boy's dream to play Captain Hook.

It's a great life being an actor, and I wouldn't change it for anything.

For me, 'Come and See' is, by a million miles, the best film about war that has ever been made. I would highly recommend, encourage and enforce anyone to watch it.

It's like a badge of honour if you're a British actor and you get the 'Harry Potter' call. It meant a lot to me.

Edward Curtis was a photographer in the late 19th century who tried to document the rapidly disappearing Native Americans. He assembled a canon of work which, today, is exemplary and invaluable.

I've done a lot of Shakespeare onstage, and I'm not convinced that the Earl of Oxford was the author of all those works, but I am convinced that the Stratfordian William Shakespeare was not. My feeling is that it was an amalgamation of many writers, in the same way that most films are a collaborative endeavor.

I'm a factory-floor actor: I learn the lines, I get there on time.

I'm Welsh. We didn't do 'Peter Pan.' We have far more ancient legends to be put to sleep with.

In a sense, I feel a lot more an outsider in Los Angeles than I did in Newfoundland.

I'm becoming more indulgent and less giving as an actor as I get older. I'm immersing myself more in roles emotionally.

I'm a sporadic reader. I have moments when I can't stop... then I kind of forget that I can read. But then I go, 'Oh God, yeah, books!'

I'm a passionate Welshman. I have a culinary relationship with language: I taste what I say because I have two languages, and each informs the other.

If you've got a camera, go to a war zone and tell a story.

I'll move back to Wales if and when I have children. I want them to speak the language I speak, but I love living in London. It's my favourite city in the whole world. I love it because it's not England, it's London.

In terms of partying and reckless abandon, I'm Don Juan. But, in terms of my heart, I'm the most loyal man you'll ever meet.

I never thought I would be in a film.

I just don't take myself as seriously anymore. But as a result of that, I am taking myself more seriously. My ego has gone on holiday, and it can't get a flight back home.

Howard Marks is a great friend and a great Welshman.

I am not gadgety at all. It's not that I'm appalled by technology, but I've taken my time acquiring any of it.

I consider projects very deeply, but there's always a point in your life where there's a bit of randomity.

I do find real life a bit overwhelming sometimes. I'm totally chaotic.

The majority of comic book villains are pure evil, but Curt Connors is an exception. Curt Connors is a good man who initially wants to save the world, but he gets hungry and greedy and reckless, and he pays the price for that.

Whenever you're doing film for television and you look at the budget that you have, which is much more constricted than a movie budget, you think, "God, are they going to be able to do what they say they are?"

The joy of a period film is that you're taken to another world. The costumes determine the way you move, and then consequently the way you breathe. And then, the way you breathe effects the way you think.

Don't be late. Learn your lines. Be good to people. Treat people nice.

But in reading Shakespeare and in reading about Edward de Vere, it's quite apparent that when you read these works that whoever penned this body of work was firstly well-travelled, secondly a multi-linguist and thirdly someone who had an innate knowledge of the inner workings and the mechanisms of a very secret and paranoid Elizabethan court. Edward de Vere ticks those three boxes and many more. William of Stratford gave his wife a bed when he died [his second best bed].

If I'd been a rock star, I'd probably now be dead.

I've been to unpretty places with the roles I've played, and I'm attracted to reckless abandon. I like being taken to the edge of my own abyss.

Whoever wrote Shakespeare is a working class hero be he an aristocrat or a peasant. Shakespeare is a great leveler. We're presented with kings, queens, emperors and giants who feel the same things as everyone else: jealousy, love, anger, bitterness, grief, loss.

If it is not scary, it is not worth doing.