So when Tim Burton, who I ended up having two children with, phoned me up and wanted me to be a chimpanzee [in 2001’s Planet of the Apes], I thought, ‘Thank Christ, somebody is casting me for not what my envelope is.’ So even though the script was terrible, I thought, ‘I’ve got to play a chimpanzee in a Tim Burton film because I’m getting out of my skin,’ which is all I want to do. I want to crawl out of this envelope and be somebody else. And I always think I’m doing it and then I watch five minutes and I give up quickly because I’m like, ‘Damn, I’m still me.’ But very early on, when I could, I started just doing everything that was different. Not for the sake of being different, but I always knew that I was, at heart, a character actor and I didn’t want to be the lead. I was in A Room With A View when I was an embryo. I didn’t know what the hell I was doing but I was learning on the job.
