Stephen Rea - biography

“Acting is way of making yourself exist.”

“At least when you’re acting you can be someone.  In front of the camera you have to be yourself.  And who am I?”

“I didn’t want to be seen as just a guy on a list.  I’m interested in good scripts, scripts that are about something, scripts that move your acting along.”

“I’m enjoying it, but I still don’t know why I’m hooked on acting.”

“That was the beginning of modern acting for me.  You don’t have to tell a camera everything.  It gets bored if you do and wants to look elsewhere.”

“The worst thing for an actor is a director that gets on your nerves and says things that actually confuse you.”

“I think great art is always ambiguous and can’t be pinned down.”

“I believe some people in this business suffer from fame because they behave in a famous fashion.”

“I am afraid of death, scared by it.  I already don’t know whether I exist or not.  So dying really terrifies me.”

“Angel was the first Irish feature film.  Neil’s first movie and my first movie.”

“I’ve been worked over by the English press because there’s an assumption that my politics are identical with my wife’s, and for that matter that my wife’s politics are identical with her politics of 20 years ago.”

“At this moment, when Ireland seems about to break into something new, we thought it was worth looking back at a time when people seemed to have found a way out of the sectarian division of the country.”

“My kids act all the time and it’s exactly what I used to do.”

“I don’t feel ashamed of my wife’s political background, and I don’t think she should either.  I feel that the people who administered the North of Ireland for the last 20 years should be ashamed.  There you are.”

“I have never been to a brothel.  I don’t think I could go into one.”

“I’ve never been in a bad play.  There might have been bad productions and I might have been bad in them, but I’ve never been in a play that wasn’t interesting or worthwhile doing on some level.”

“People ask me to smile for the camera, but somehow it always comes out gloomy.”

“People often refer to my career before The Crying Game as something which led up to that point.  But I was very fulfilled in what I was doing.”

“The Butcher Boy is a very great novel indeed and a very important Irish novel.  The ambiguity of that is, he’s writing a book about an appalling situation and he does it in a hilarious way.”

“You have to know who you are, if you don’t you have nightmares.”

Stephen Rea has appeared in the following films:
Cry of the Banshee (1970)
On a Paving Stone Mounted (1978)
Angel (1982)
The Doctor and the Devils (1985)
Loose Connections (1985)
Life Is Sweet (1990)
The Crying Game (1992)
Interview with the Vampire: The Vampire Chronicles (1994)
Prêt-à-Porter (1994)
Princess Caraboo (1994)
All Men Are Mortal (1995)
Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea (1995)
Michael Collins (1996)
The Last of the High Kings (1996)
Double Tap (1997)
Hacks (1997)
The Butcher Boy (1997)
Still Crazy (1998)
The End of the Affair (1999)
Guinevere (1999)
The Life Before This (1999)
The Musketeer (2001)
On the Edge (2001)
Evelyn (2002)
FeardotCom (2002)
Proud (2004)
The I Inside (2004)
Tara Road (2005)
V for Vendetta (2005)
Sisters (2006)
The Reaping (2007)
Until Death (2007)
The Heavy (2008)
Heidi 4 Paws (2008)
Espion(s) (2009)
Stella Days (2011)
Blackthorn (2011)
Underworld: Awakening (2012)