Er ist verdammt groß, verdammt schlank, verdammt intellektuell für einen Schauspieler. Das ist der erste Eindruck, den ich von Colin Firth habe, der mich stehend im Raum empfängt, die schwarze Tom-Ford-Brille zurechtrückend. Na klar, Tom Ford: In dessen Debütfilm brillierte Firth als schwuler "Single Man", eine Rolle, die ihm trotz des rotgolden Eherings, den er hier zur Schau trägt, deutlich mehr auf den Leib geschneidert scheint als der Klamauknebenbuhler in "Bridget Jones". Er setzt sich, antwortet in druckreifen Sätzen auf die Frage, ob die Schauspielerei ein Symbol unseres Handelns in der Realität ist. Wie treffen wir die richtigen Entscheidungen in unseren Handlungen?
"I had a girlfriend many years ago who used to think that acting was a meaningless art. She was an artist and she'd say it's just copying, it's aching people, what is it? At the same time she used to say I don't trust words, words never say what they mean. A word is never trustworthy, never say what they say.
And I used to say but that's why we are acting. It's trying to go beyond, let's go where the words can't go. So they're obviously symbiotic: The writer is almost literally like a god to an actor because he created the caracter. And you know, if I'm not working, the thing that I most want to do is to read. It's a very very intimate relationship between an actor and a writer.
The written word is possibly my favorite form, and I'm kind of thrilled to writers but I'm also aware how important the space is, what takes place between the words and what happens when the sentence finishes and something else takes over. Watching performances is very different from reading, and so interpretation (and this means interpretation) has a huge eloquence in itself. All the nuances of the silence or of the inflected voice - you can transform a meaning entirely with inflection, gesture, what kind of silence you're experiencing. Those things are very largely the province of the actor.
You have to decide what your caracter's objective is, what the obstacles are, what you have to do to overcome these obstacles, where the changes take place, how adversity defines your caracter. Caracter is plot, plot is caracter - you know, how you negotiate is how people know how you are. These are the decisions actors have to make to."