On his childhood:
“I got in a lot of trouble when I was a teenager. I didn’t know how to interact with people. I felt different. But partying was the answer. It made me feel OK, like I could be among other people...I couldn’t hang out with my friends anymore because I’d always get in trouble with them. So there I was – alone again, an outsider, not able to fit in the world. That’s when I started acting.”
On having 17 projects scheduled for 2017:
“I felt like now was my chance to do all these weird projects I had been thinking about, so I might as well strike while the iron’s hot. I was shooting The Deuce in New York. The sun’s shining, I’d just got off work and I was walking across town to go teach. And I remember thinking ‘Wow, my life is great. And it’s great because I’m working so much and I’m doing everything that I want to do’.”
On realizing he needed to slow down:
“I really had a moment of crisis. I hit a wall...I feel like it’s not a total coincidence that I hit my own personal wall at the time that I did – last November. I think a lot of people have been questioning their lives lately in the States and what they’re doing, how they’re living.”
On not having acted in six months:
“To somebody like Daniel Day-Lewis, that sounds like nothing. But for me, that’s an eternity.”
On what precipitated this change:
“It was a gradual thing. I hadn’t been in a relationship in a long time and was, like, realising how much I was running from feelings and people. And how much of my identity was wrapped up in work. I knew who I was on a movie set. But take me away from that and it’s like, oh shit, I have to interact with people outside of the dynamics of a movie set? That’s really scary. But as soon as I took a step back and stopped working, it was like, holy shit. All the feelings flooded in and it was like this is what I was running from. This is what I was using work to hide from. This is why I had to occupy myself every minute of the day, 24 hours a day. Because I was running, running from emotions and being vulnerable and being around people. Being myself.”
On being addicted to work:
“The thing about work addiction is our culture supports it. We reward hard work and success. But it can really mask addictive, escapist behaviour. I’ve never done heroin in my life, but I imagine if you get off heroin, people talk about facing reality, all these feelings coming back. Whether you know it or not, you want to bury them with the drug. And when you’re turning to things outside yourself to fill yourself, there’s never going to be enough. I’m still just dealing with all of it, but with addiction, a lot of it comes down to ego. And in Hollywood that might even be more dangerous because the mirror that reflects your ego back is like 100 miles wide in Hollywood.”
On what's next:
“I’m at that point where I realise how valuable time is. I think that I’ll be happier if I spend it doing things that I really love instead of spreading myself so thinly, doing a lot of things that I kind of care about, but not with my whole heart. What I’m really conscious of is that I realise what a great life I have, so I’m truly trying to be grateful. Forty is a big milestone, but I feel like I went through my own version of a midlife crisis – so I don’t think I’ll hit another one at 40.”
When the interviewer makes the observation that they say you never kill an addiction, you just replace it with something else:
“There you go, dude, that’s exactly what people do. It is so hard to wake up to [addiction]. It’s so hard to see it. I thought I was living the life I always wanted to live. When I finally did wake up, I was completely isolated, emotionally, from everyone around me. Whatever your religion or non-religion is, I truly believe we’re all looking for the same thing. We all just want to be happy or feel like we’ve contributed. And I’ve found that is synonymous with being present. That’s what I didn’t have before – when I was doing five billion projects at once, I was everywhere but present. The curse of that is that I actually couldn’t enjoy my success. I was nominated for an Oscar, I was working with all my heroes. All the dreams I’d had as a young man had come true. And I still couldn’t enjoy it. It was never going to be enough.”
Read the full interview at GQ Australia.
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