I don't worry too much about learning lines per se. The memorization is the easy part for me, usually. For me, it's more about working on the context, back story, intention, motivation, etc. Once that's in place, the lines come pretty naturally.
Players enjoy complexity – especially the power that comes with powerful tools. What they do not like is “uninteresting decisions,” or games that leave them confused or with too many “easy” decisions – decisions where there is no learning to be had.
Because I'm Irish, I've always done an accent. Not doing an accent is off-putting because I sound like me. I love doing an accent. Doing the accent from West Virginia was great, and we had to get specific with it.
For me, when I did 'Thor,' they changed my lines at the last minute, and then I had to speak with an English accent - and it was horrifying. I was in front of a crew of 250 people on my first day - never happened to me before.
You're the hero of your own story. So it's interesting for historical revisionism to happen. I had let go of my own story from my own childhood and whatever anger I had and I began to see it from a very different place. It's really easy to be like "This thing happened to me! Look what they did to me or are doing to me." These are such powerful ideas and it's so easy to hold onto them forever.
I'm pretty focused on my career, and if it comes down to hanging out with somebody or learning my lines, it's gonna be learning my lines.
In the South we experienced, you know, some black kids who gave us a hard time because - cause 'you talk white.' We didn't talk white. We talked fairly proper. Plus, we had a Midwestern accent, so we didn't have a Southern accent, either. So it wasn't really talking white; it was talking different.
I'm terrible at learning lines. I'm good at learning lines when I don't have to be word-perfect.
I have had people come up to me in the street - one woman actually told me she hated my accent, she can't believe I'm on the telly and my accent is so annoying. I ended up laughing because I thought, 'this person doesn't know me but she felt she could come up and slate my accent.'
Learning how to have 'healthy' attachments sounds easy, but in fact, for someone like me who had damaged early relationships, it's like learning to be fluent in Chinese.
It's stressful to keep doing audition after audition after audition. You finish one and go to the next one, and you have to learn lines. For me, I have to work on my accent, so I was getting accent coaching and acting coaching. I wanted to make good impressions.
Memorising my lines is actually something I do fairly well. I look at it a few times and it is pretty much there. When your shooting on TV, they do it in such a way that it is pretty easy.
I do one accent - my own. I can make it louder or quieter. That is the sum total of my vocal range. I thought I could do an American accent until I tried it in front of an American - the expression of horror is still burnt onto my retinas.
As you're learning your lines and the character you're playing, you're going to make mistakes but I learned more about Shug Avery. I learned my lines, but everything had to be done quickly.
If I had my choice in life I would have had the gifts of Tennessee Williams or Eugene O'Neill. Unfortunately my gifts lie in comedy and so comedy comes fairly easy to me and I occasionally have an idea for a very serious piece and I do it, but the ideas don't come that readily to me.