Anytime anybody does anything – unless it’s in the realm of the obviously awful, which is fun too in a different way – it is in many ways a success.

My role models were always the Pacinos and the Oldmans, the guys who get dirty with their characters, and I arrived in L.A. during the big boom of ‘Dawson’s Creek.’ I was getting cast as the boy next door, or the friend of the jock. I thought, ‘Did I really have to do all that studying?’

One thing I loved about New Zealand was the indoor/outdoor lifestyle of the place.

Like I said, when all of that goes away and you just completely lose yourself in the fantasy of it, then that’s usually when I walk out of the theatre or turn off the television and just go: “That was brilliant!”

The last thing I thought that was utterly brilliant was the season finale of the last season of ‘Homeland’. I was just completely and utterly speechless and I think my friend was poking me going: “What did you think?”

The craft of putting together a performance on film or television is incredibly intricate; you’re putting together a story that is completely out of order, that you have to make some sense of, that you have to keep some coherence to the story, to the character.

We’ve been talking about Lorde like crazy! She’s amazing!

When I started in the mid-’90s, the goal was really to shoot for a film career and stay there.

For most of my 20s, I looked like I was 12. Now that I’m pushing 40, I guess I look closer to… 15? It must be my macrobiotic diet. Oh, wait, except that I don’t have one of those.

I play Father Francis in ‘The Exorcist Prequel.’ It’s fantastic. We are shooting in Morrocco and Rome. Paul Schrader is directing; Stellan Skarsgard plays the younger Max Von Sydow character. It’s just a fantastic script. It’s a very eerie, very scary script. It encomposes a growing dread that I think is really appropriate for the film.

I’m a late bloomer. I believe 40 is the new 19.

Sometimes people ask me how old I am, and I have to stop and remember. I forget myself!

I do like to turn a phrase, but it’s all about how you turn it.

But TV has changed completely. It’s not until you come into people’s homes that everyone says, ‘You’re a success now.

Whenever somebody hates you too much it usually means they have deeper feelings for you because nobody bothers to hate you unless they actually feel something.

If we’re talking music I could go on and on and on.

I kind of grew up in a commune, but it wasn’t a hippie commune necessarily, but it was a big house with a lot of families, we all lived together and it was the 70s, whatever that means.

For me as an actor because I’ve been at it so long, it becomes much harder to watch movies because you really see the seams of everything.

My father is a college professor and that’s about the extent of my college experience. I’m sort of a professional student forever. I think just as human beings we always have a student who is alive in us and is waiting to pop up and make us feel like we are 16 years-old again.

It’s funny, people talk about the characters they play and who do you sort of see yourself as or which ones maybe were closest to you and in some ways.

I have a million story-lines for ‘Revenge’ and they never listen to me.

I’m not going to lie. I would definitely steal stuff from set.

I wanted to be in an anti-gravity machine so bad! Maybe a different time, a different place.

I never wanted to get caught in doing something that was really one note.

I think you kind of hope for people gush over movies, but I think the opposite is great sometimes, too. I’d rather have a movie that you’re angry about and that you’re talking about the next day, than something you forget about when the popcorn goes into the trash.