contact Robert
"I haven't really decided to be an actor yet! I started doing plays when I was about 15 or 16. I only did it because my dad saw a bunch of pretty girls in a restaurant and he asked them where they came from and they said drama group. He said "Son, that is where you need to go."
"I aspire to be Jack Nicholson. I love every single mannerism. I used to try and be him in virtually everything I did, I don't know why. I watched One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest when I was about 13, and I dressed like him. I tried to do his accent. I did everything like him. I think it's kind of stuck with me."
"I've changed so much. I'm not nearly as cocky as I was, I was a real prat for the first month. I didn't talk to anyone. I just drank coffee and told everyone I was 24 and this famous theatre actor just back from South Africa."
"Thats the worst thing, I dont really care if people say I'm a bad actor, I can like work on that, but if they just say that he's ugly thats just like "oh.. really?"
"I am now determined to do really weird parts but I think I overdo it in auditions so nobody really trusts me! "
"Sometimes I think, 'To hell with acting,' and then I realize I could be working at a shoe shop, acting is much cooler."
"I have no idea. I think I would have just gone to university and would have kind of just done the average thing."
"It's strange, somebody asked for my autograph the other day. Because I finished school and I'm not really doing anything at the moment, I was just kind of aimlessly wandering around London and these two guys who were about 30 came up and asked for my autograph. I was really quite proud at the time, and they wanted to take photos and stuff. And then they were sort of wandering around and I was kind of wandering around and I bumped into them about three times, and every single time their respect for me kept growing and growing and growing."
"I walked out the wrong car door and started walking into the crowd, An interviewer said, 'Give your best horror scream,' and Stan did this great scream and I was too much of a wimp to do one. It was pathetic!" On his first red carpet experience
"I started doing a paper round when I was about 10. I started earning £10 a week and then I was obsessed with earning money until I was about 15."
"Up until I was 12 my sisters used to dress me up as a girl and introduce me as 'Claudia'! Twelve was a turning point as I moved to a mixed school and then I became cool and discovered hair gel. "
"Someone stole my shoelaces once from my shoes. I still wear them and never put laces in them - they're like my trademark shoes now!"
"I'm just a big, hard tool.""I'm really afraid of getting hit by cars, like terrified of it. I'm terrified of crossing streets. I'm also very accident-prone...I think people aim for me."
"I went to do my first big movie when I was 17. I was in South Africa for three and half months, and I was by myself."
"I was just taking out my trash and I had, like, 300 cans of Diet Coke. It was just like, 'How did that happen?' I don't even remember buying them. I also like Cinnamon Toast Crunch. My addictions are pretty much the only things I consume."
"I spent a long time trying to figure out how to play [Edward's part] without making a fool out of myself. The whole book is written from Bella's perspective and she's in love with him. I mean, the guy can be anybody — he could be an alien — and you see past everything if you're in love with someone."
"If I go and try to watch a movie by myself I'll be completely transfixed the whole time, concentrating one hundred percent. But if I'm with another person on a date or something, within two minutes I'll be like 'This is rubbish, this is rubbish. We should leave and do something else.' I don't really know why."
"I've got a terrible memory—I end up repeating myself quite a lot. The only thing I can remember is that I'm going to repeat myself!"
"It sounds lame, but I was really concentrating on this job. It was my first American thing so I was pretty focused. I went to Portland for two months before we starting shooting, and I just didn't talk to anybody for ages during the beginning of the shoot. I never went out, but I kind of broke down half way through. I was like, 'Okay, people are starting to think that I'm actually out of my mind now.'"
"We didn’t have packed lunches at my school. I was a lunch monitor as well - I used to take everyone’s chips!"
"I quite liked Sharkey and George and then there was a cartoon with rapper MC Hammer in it - Hammertime - I loved that cartoon, it was genius! They don’t make cartoons like that anymore."
"[My favourite teacher was] probably my English teacher because she got me into writing instead of just answering the question. I used to hand in homework with 20 pages of nonsense and she’d still mark it. She was a really amazing teacher."
"I got expelled from my school when I was 12 - I was quite bad!"
"[School reports] were always pretty bad - I never ever did my homework. I always turned up for lessons as I liked my teachers but my report said I didn’t try very hard."
"The day before I was just sitting in Leicester Square, happily being ignored by everyone. Then suddenly strangers are screaming your name. Amazing."
"I don’t want to be paid ever again! I hate money! I want to do anything for free!"
"I basically just started acting. I did two other movies and a few plays before but I’d kinda done them one after the other, so I didn’t really know what I was doing then. I still don’t really now."
"Someone asked for my autograph the other day which is quite cool. But, I don’t know. I hope [Pottermania] doesn’t make me not come out of my house, because I barely come out of my house as it is!"
"Because I finished school, I’m not really doing anything at the moment. I was just aimlessly wandering around London, and these two guys who were about 30 or something came up and asked for my autograph. I was really quite proud at the time and did it, and they took photos and stuff. They were sort of wandering around, and I was wandering around, and I bumped into them like three times. And every single time their respect for me was just growing!"
"They [Barnes Theatre Club] were a very good group, and for some reason when I finished the backstage thing, I just decided to that I should try to act. So I auditioned for Guys and Dolls and got a little tiny part as some Cuban dancer or something and then in the next play I got the lead part, and then I got my agent. So I owe everything to that little club."
"Since I started acting it’s kind of been a bit mad. I never really did anything before and two years ago I started acting and I’ve kind of been in work ever since. Then Harry Potter came along and it’s been a huge step and a massive event in my life."
"I am now determined to do really weird parts but I think I overdo it in auditions so nobody really trusts me!"
"I wanted to try theatre after Harry Potter and I wanted to do something weird. I was offered an American thing where I had to sign up to three movie contracts and I dunno… I don’t really know what I should be doing yet, so I prefer to do nothing really! There was one script that I really, really liked. I got down to the last two and they picked the other guy which was a bit annoying."
"Sometimes I think, ‘to hell with acting,’ and then I realize I could be working at a shoe shop. Acting is much cooler."
"I aspire to be Jack Nicholson. I love his every single mannerism. I used to try and be him in virtually everything I did, I don’t know why. I watched One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest when I was about 13, and I dressed like him. I tried to do his accent. I did everything like him. I think it kind of stuck with me."
"[Drama school] was a social thing. I literally went there 100 per cent to meet these girls sitting at the next table."
"I like meetings [in L.A.] a lot. You go in, no one cares if you’re a nice person or not. You just do it, and if you can do it, you do it, and if you can’t, you can’t."
"I haven’t really decided to be an actor yet! I started doing plays when I was about 15 or 16. I only did it because my dad saw a bunch of pretty girls in a restaurant and he asked them where they came from and they said drama group. He said ‘Son, that is where you need to go.’"
"That’s the worst thing, I dont really care if people say I’m a bad actor, I can like work on that, but if they just say that he’s ugly that’s just like, ‘oh… really?’"
"[If I hadn't become an actor] I think I would have just gone to university and would have kind of just done the average thing."
"[On the red carpet] I walked out the wrong car door and started walking into the crowd. An interviewer said, ‘Give your best horror scream,’ and Stan did this great scream and I was too much of a wimp to do one. It was pathetic!"
"My dad wanted me to be an actor."
"I really wasn’t part of the acting fraternity at my school, but I joined this thing after my dad argued with me for ages. I think he had some sort of weird foresight about it. I went [to the Barnes Theatre Club] and I worked backstage on the first play I did. They used to do two shows a year and they are all great. So many people from there had become actors."
"It is unbelievable that this stroke of luck has completely changed my entire life. I can’t even remember what I was thinking those two years ago. Now I sort of do things differently, and I am reading all these scripts. I was out in LA a couple of weeks ago. I got an agent in LA, and it is ridiculous."
“I think the last thing I did, which was The Haunting of Toby Jugg for BBC2. I play a World War 2 pilot who gets shot and paralysed. He gets terrible shellshock and basically goes insane. It’s a great part. I was in a wheelchair all the time, which is always good, just chain-smoking throughout the entire film.”
"The acting’s come along by accident. I’ve never trained or anything, so I’ve only very recently become even vaguely comfortable with it. On Harry Potter I was so consciously of the fact that I didn’t know what I was doing. I used to sit on the side of the set throwing up. I think I will go to drama school now, thought. I did a play which I got fired from in the West End, and I realised I need to learn some of the fundamentals – like how to act."
"I’m directing a play at the moment, but I don’t know about film directing. Actors tend to think it’s purely to do with the acting, but having watched Mike Newell on Harry Potter, there’s just so much admin and diplomacy, which I don’t think I’ve go the patience for."
"I’d like to be in a Terry Gilliam film, playing a midget. I’d like to do a Godard film, or one with Michael Cimino. But the script means more to me than the people involved."
"The maze stuff was really, really fun to do. It was so real. And because it was all hydraulic walls, no one actually knew if it would kill you or not, if you actually got trapped there. So, it was quite nice to be doing enforced method acting."
"We did a lot of special effects in Ring Of The Nibelungs and that kind of helped on Harry Potter. But it was on such a smaller scale. There’s 2,000 people working on Harry Potter and I don’t think there’s many films that can afford that type of epic-ness. It was very different. The scale is just so huge."
"I hadn’t done anything for about six months before so I was a little bit unfit. I remember the costume designer saying when I was trying on swimming trunks, ‘Aren’t you supposed to be fit, you could be playing a sissy poet or something.’ The next day I got a call from the assistant director about a personal training programme."
"I did a tiny amount of work on Vanity Fair which doesn’t quite match the standard of Harry Potter… oops… don’t put that, sorry, what was the question?"
"At first I felt a bit [of pressure], but after a week, when all the cast were known, and they are all so nice, then the feeling was gone. When I was shooting my first scene, the maze scene, there was a crew of about 150 people, me, Dan and the producer. Later on, it became about 2000 people involved in shooting. I’m really glad I could get started in a more relaxed environment and get used to it progressively."
"We [the Harry Potter cast] did a bonding week where we made fools of ourselves doing lots of improvising. I paired up with Rupert a lot."
"I had to do some training at the beginning (of GoF) because I was supposed to be like the sporty kid in school and Daniel was about twice the size of me. His chest and stuff. I don’t know how that happened."
"I had a personal trainer in the beginning (of filming) and everyone was telling me to do it, but I did it for about two weeks then… I put my shoulder out."
"I got a call the next day from the assistant director saying that they were putting me on a personal training programme. I thought that would be pretty cool, because it would make me take it seriously. It was run by one of the stunt team, who are the most absurdly fit guys in the world. I can’t even do ten press-ups. I did about three weeks of that, and in the end I think he got so bored of trying to force me to do it that he wrote it all down so that I could do it at home."
"Kids have followed the books quite closely so the worry is [Goblet of Fire] is going to be dark for them, but I think your imagination is more terrifying than a film could ever be and I think they’re ready to see this side of the franchise."
"I read a lot, as the shoot went on, and I read [Goblet of Fire] loads and loads of times. I sort of gradually found out about all these Harry Potter websites, and the comments they put in the forums I thought were really really helpful, because they remind you of little things that you’ve never even noticed in the book, which are really helpful. There are lots of cool things, like even his main description, which was like ‘the strong silent type’ or something. I completely overlooked that in the book. And I read some fans saying that, so I’ll play it strong and silent."
"[Ralph Fiennes] could only shoot on certain days, so me and Dan tried to get bits of it done without him. And then when he came, because of the way the last bits were shot with Voldemort, a lot of it had to be rearranged. And so it was strange, because the first time I shot it I’d had about a month off through January and so I sort of psyched myself up to do this scene. And then when I re-shot it it was, I think we were filming the Yule Ball at the same time, so it’s kind of, you’re in this happy mode, and then you go in and you’ve got to be like… so I ended up sitting in a corner like eating mud and stuff… which didn’t really work."
"[Filming] was cool, it’s something different to anything I’ve done before and I hadn’t done a film or a part that big before so it was interesting. Working with like the best actors in England, the most famous actors, it was really fun, really exciting."
"There were a couple of times where you think you’re swimming towards a guy with a breathing apparatus and then you find it’s just something in the water and you’re like [imitates freaking out] and then you just know what to do and they film your stupid face just screaming underwater and then everyone starts laughing and it’s just like, ‘Ah, great!’"
"We had to do this scene looking like heroes diving into the lake. they had a stand-in doing perfect dives on the first take. Then Stan, Clemence, And I tried, but none of us could dive in right, and we all looked really stupid."
"I was actually having nightmares about [the premiere] for months in advance."
"I can’t say I was [a Harry Potter fan]. I wasn’t not a fan. I hadn’t read any of the books or anything. I read The Goblet of Fire when I was doing the other film, and I really liked that. I got through it in about two days. I’d say I’m a pretty big fan now."
"I knew the [Goblet of Fire] casting director from another movie which I did, and they wanted to see me for this part, but I was doing another movie over the casting period, so I ended up seeing Mike Newell and Mary Selway and Fiona Weir - who were casting at the time - before anyone else was seen for casting. And then, I went to do this other movie, and then the day I came back… I got a call back, and basically, that’s what happened."
"[I would switch roles with] Probably Harry. I think. Not being arrogant or anything. I just think it’s a really intricate and it’s an amazing part. I think also when you don’t really have the opportunity to be guaranteed seven films when you’re growing up during the filming."
"Well, I haven’t actually died ‘live’ yet but I’ve been dead a few times. It’s strange, but it’s quite sort of relaxing. You feel like a bit of a therapist, because everyone’s giving you all their grief, and you’re just lying there listening. Yeah, it was quite nice, like no pressure after a couple weeks. I enjoyed it."
"I had never done scuba-diving before, so I did training during the first week. I was in a tiny little tub that was a practice tank. I did not see the big tank until they first started shooting in it. It was about a hundred times the size of the practice tank and it was so much deeper, so that was sort of scary when I first got there, because you have to get used to all the pressure and things like that. I don’t know if you have been scuba-diving, but it is very different. I thought it was really easy in that little shallow pool, because it is, but when you are doing it in a really deep tank it is kind of scary at first. I got used to it quickly though."
"I think the most embarrassing part of that was just the normal dancing. When the rock band comes. I think there was two days where the crew was like, ‘Just dance, just dance.’ So, you can’t, in a club or whatever. That was really awkward."
"I think the yule ball is more attractive to the girls who read it. I never really thought, "Oh, I get to go to the ball!"
"Yeah, that whole sequence was pretty intense. They shot it right at the beginning—within my first week I shot in the maze. It was really difficult to translate all the things in the book that happened in the maze—like all these riddles and things—into film. It was almost impossible. The way Mike Newell did it was really good. He came up with the idea that in the maze it is just the fear and the darkness and the isolation that kind of drives all the competitors a bit insane. We were really hyped up. You are on 100% adrenaline and you’re starting this in the first week and you have just met all the other actors the week before and now you have to go crazy with them. That was pretty intense, but I think it was really the most fun, because it was really physical work. Shooting wands at each other was really fun. The swimming thing was pretty physical too. In fact all my scenes were kind of action scenes. They were all pretty physical."
"I think basically the characters have been pretty fully developed in the first three, and it’s just going to take another turn into being more of a thriller. It’s more boom, boom, boom, to the climax. I think it’s a much faster paced, action-oriented film than the others. I think that it’s a little bit darker, and they kill of key character. There’s always going to be a little bit of a twist - killing someone is always a bit of a shock."
"[The cemetery scene] was the bit I was most looking forward to doing. You don’t really get to die that often, you know?"
"It was so easy for me to get into [the Harry Potter] universe."
"I’m not actually allowed to say anything about it, but [the return of Voldemort] is fantastic. That will be the most stunning sequence in the Potter series."
[To a visitor on the set] "Sorry about my appearance. You’ve caught me on a dead day."
I picked out] the most ridiculous, extravagant clothes - they looked really good in the shop. And then I put them on and I thought: you look such an idiot."
"I read the Variety review and their only comment was rangy. I thought it meant from the range, like a cowboy. But it just means tall and lanky."
"In England if you want to look rough, you go out and get really drunk and come in looking really hungover, but if you do that in America, it’s like, have you got a drinking problem?"
"I’m quite immature so that’s quite good, so I prefer to be a heart-throb!"
"I still trip over my feet and stuff when I’m not supposed to be doing anything."
"I guess I have this thing for dragons. It is very strange."
"I am in a band at the moment called Bad Girls. The band belongs to my first girlfriend’s current boyfriend and he was having an open mic night. He invited me to sing, but it was just a bit of fun - that was about six months ago. I don’t know where that’s going to go."
"I have been playing the piano for my entire life - since I was three or four. And the guitar - I used to play classical guitar from when I was about five to 12 years of age. Then I didn’t play guitar for like years. About four or five years ago, I got out the guitar again and just atarted playing blues and stuff. I am not very good at the guitar, but I am all right. I am in a band in London as well."
"[The band] is kind of like rocky Led Zeppelin type stuff. We only have done a couple of gigs. We are still trying to figure out its style. It is just a couple of friends of mine and some other people that I have met fairly recently. We just wanted to start a band for something to do. A lot of my friends are actors and we have so little to do all the time, so instead of just being bored, we were like, ‘Why not start a band?’ So we did!"
