A Quote by Kurt Sutter
The trap in Hamlet is he's the most passive of Shakespeare's characters. He's not a Richard III, not out there taking a lot of action. It's a lot of asides and soliloquies where he's wrapped in angst, and that's not a very interesting character.
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I had been in a Shakespeare company for three years and done a lot of Shakespeare. That was fun. That was interesting. It was a lot of work - anything other than Shakespeare was less work. I had a lot of interesting roles, but I don't point to them and say, "That was more interesting than that," because I don't know what the criteria are.
I went to a Jesuit school and they did a William Shakespeare play every year. I got to know Shakespeare as parts I wanted to play. I missed out on playing Ophelia - it was an all-boys school. The younger boys used to play the girls, I played Lady Anne in Richard III and Lady Macbeth, then Richard II and Malvolio. I just became a complete Shakespeare nut, really.
Francis Underwood was entirely based on Richard III. When Michael Dobbs wrote 'House of Cards' in the original British series, Richard III is what he based the character on.
I think the thing that made this stand out the most was just the fact that there's a lot more character to these characters. We see their back stories and we see their present situations, and that was a lot more interesting than just the regular procedural with four heads standing around a body, spelling it out for you. It's a lot more of a roller coaster ride.
Ive always enjoyed the teen angst thing. I had a lot of teen angst as I was growing up, so I think I have a lot to say about it through characters before I have to move on.
That became my aesthetic - a very Chekhovian, American realist aesthetic in the tradition of Raymond Carver, Richard Ford, and Tobias Wolff. The perfectible, realist story that had these somewhat articulate characters, a lot of silence, a lot of obscured suffering, a lot of manliness, a lot of drinking, a lot of divorces. As my writing went on, I shed a lot of those elements.
'Hamlet' was the first movie I saw. In 1948, my mother said, 'I'm going to take you to see 'Hamlet' with Laurence Olivier.' She was worried about taking me to it because she wasn't sure I was old enough to understand it or to maybe be adversely affected by it, but I got recordings of it and memorized all the soliloquies.
It took a while to decide I wanted to do Hamlet. It wasn't that I was daunted - I'd been acting professionally since my mid-20s and had some pretty big Shakespearean roles under my belt by that stage, at 32: Petruchio in 'The Taming of the Shrew,' Edgar in 'King Lear,' Antony, Richard III. But when it came to Hamlet, I hesitated.
I have an aunt who believed strongly that teaching kids that Shakespeare is 'hard' is wrong, so she handed me 'Hamlet' when I was in kindergarten to see what would happen. What happened was I did a book report on 'Hamlet' and caused quite a lot of trouble!
It's been very interesting. We've seen a lot of interesting testimony. We've seen a lot of interesting people, a lot of allegations, a lot of lies, a lot of misinformation and some truth.
I had great English teachers in high school who first piqued my interest in Shakespeare. Each year, we read a different play - 'Othello,' 'Julius Caesar,' 'Macbeth,' 'Hamlet' - and I was the nerd in class who would memorize soliloquies just for the fun of it.
I'm a big fan of the 70's action films. Where there is a lot of character and a lot of great action, but the action is kind of cemented with a great back-story with characters. And I thought, this kind of reminded me of the movies that, early on when I was telling Dwayne (Johnson) and the guys, the producer... my whole thing is if you look at a movie like The Driver by Walter Hill, it's a film where there's no names. They are just named, "the driver", "the cop".
I'll never forget watching my dad perform in a Shakespeare in the Park production of 'Richard III' in New York.
War is big business. It's a lot of money going to and fro, and unfortunately a lot of angst, and a lot of fear, and a lot of doubt. And eventually a lot of wonderful people, like soldiers, like men and women that are out there trying to do the best they can, they come back being wounded on many levels.
The thing I respond to the most is just great writing, interesting characters. I like to think that there is something fun about playing a character that has a lot of authority in her own life.
I think a few of my most visible roles are crazy or peppy girls, but I've played a lot of characters who are soldiers, or fighters, or meditative characters, and a lot of this stuff hasn't come out.
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