You know when you’re a kid, they tell you it’s all grow up, get a job. Get married, get a house, have a kid and that’s it. But the truth is the world is so much stranger than that. It’s so much darker, so much madder. And so. Much. Better.
Don’t be afraid of wearing your heart on your sleeve - in declaring the films that you love, the films that you want to make, the life that you’ve had, and the lives you can help reflect in cinema. For myself, for a long time… maybe I felt inauthentic or something, I felt like my voice wasn’t worth hearing, and I think everyone’s voice is worth hearing. So if you’ve got something to say, say it from the rooftops.
To have compassion as an actor is to have compassion for the characters that I play. That’s what it means to me. Whatever they’re going through, whatever their predicaments, I have to suffer with them. I have to understand.
When you do something noble and beautiful and nobody noticed, do not be sad. For the sun every morning is a beautiful spectacle and yet most of the audience still sleeps.
Interviewer:
Give us your best tip for overcoming depression.
Stephen Fry:
To regard it as being like the weather. It's not your responsibility that it's raining, but it is real when it rains, and the fact that it's raining does not mean that the rain is never going to stop. The only thing to do is to believe that, one day, it won't be raining and accept it so you can find a mental umbrella to shield yourself from the worst. The sun will eventually come up.