Joel Edgerton Quotes

I'm not saying I'm a family guy, but maybe that's what people see in me: some kind of paternal quality.

Making a movie like 'Felony' is hard work because you're really putting your own ideas on the screen. You can't hide behind some other person's script; you're saying, 'This is my brain, and I want you to know what I think'.'

One of the great joys of being able to write something you can make, if you get certain actors you want and love, you're kind of buying yourself a front row seat to watch them work.

I had a black belt in Shotokan as a kid.

I love the idea of real-life experiences finding their way into fiction. I think that's really cool.

It feels good to be fit and strong.

'Animal Kingdom' feels like a suburban Melbourne version of 'The Godfather 'to me. It's epic and Shakespearean in its story, and yet you still feel like you can reach out and touch it.

I came out of high school, where my heroes were, like, Michael Jordan and a lot of local rugby players - and on the movie front, it was Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone.

I'm not going to allow myself to second-guess projects. I'm just going to do the ones that I fully love and believe in - that's a real privilege.

This is the world we live in, isn't it? Tons of spin-offs; people reboot things very quickly. I was amazed how quickly they made a Wolverine movie, then, 'Let's do another origins Wolverine movie.'

Even to this day, when I think about the fact that I'm in this 'Star Wars' world, that I'm a half-brother to Darth Vader and an uncle to Luke Skywalker, it's too hard to wrap my head around.

Pulled pork jokes never get old.

People love boxing, but you've gotta wait two or three years for your favorite boxer to have a fight.

My whole journey and career has been really interesting, but the one element it never really had was any sense of great momentum.

I would have happily done 'Bourne Legacy,' but a lot of decisions are made for you.

Part of the privilege of being an actor is the people you get to work with.

Pittsburgh felt like the perfect size of a city to me. There's enough to do, but it's not like living in a circus. I also really loved how sports-enthusiastic Pittsburgh people are: how proud of their sports they are.

The little bit of buzz around 'Warrior' led to a lot of opportunities anyway, before the movie even came out.

There's definitely a fascination with crime stories and stories of characters acting out against authority.

I love so much what I do that I spend so much time thinking about it, and then I go home, and then I'm thinking about it, so it's nice sometimes when a movie is over, and then the niggling feelings about whether you've did it right or not start to ebb away.

I really like kids.

I often put any project I write in a different decade just to roll the thought around in my head. There's a thriller I've written that I think would be nice to set in the '70s or '80s, just to take cell phones away from the movie. There's nothing like the piercing ring of an old-school telephone to really scare an audience.

I was a good boy; I was never in trouble for anything.

I spent a lot of time outdoors as a kid.

All I can say is working with Ridley Scott is a dream come true.

I had a brother who was bullying me to write something because we wanted to make our own movies. So it was out of necessity in the beginning. Over time, I began to see that I could create the roles I wanted to play rather than just waiting around.

I don't appreciate, really, talking to journalists when there's a sense of wanting to kick up dust to sell more papers or get more hits on their Internet site.

I don't have any kids of my own.

The first video I ever watched was on a Beta system because everyone thought Beta was the way but then it ended up being video so we backed the wrong horse.

Fighting in the ring or cage is very much different from fighting in the street. Fighting in the street is very much fueled by anger, pride, and male dominance and ego.

I had a bit of a martial arts background from when I was a teenager: I did a bit of karate.

It's easier to play aggression and malevolence onscreen, often, than to hit softer notes.

In Australia, there aren't a lot of people committed to art, so these communities form that are dedicated to music, theater, cinema, but they're very small. So, they tend to move ahead on the power of collaboration, enthusiasm and creativity.

Actors are excused from a lot of things, and we get away with a lot ... I find it equally interesting and exciting as it is disgusting and bizarre.

I learned a great lesson early on, even before I was really an actor, from that movie 'Planes, Trains & Automobiles' that John Hughes made: that you could make a movie that's really, really, really, really funny, and sometimes you can still achieve ... making the audience feel very deep emotions as well.

I'd never really imagined myself as an action star.

Gene Hackman was a superstar in the '70s - with that face!

I think I'd be too scared to direct my first movie and put myself in the center.

To act with a tennis ball and imagine it's a tentacle, or if you're in some kind of wilderness film and you go, 'Okay, we can't have a grizzly bear here, but imagine when you step over the rock there there's a grizzly bear.' I don't know. They're tough moments.

Having rain on your tuxedo is a pretty good reminder that you're not James Bond.

I just love good movies. And not every movie you're going to end up in is always going to turn out right, but at least walk into it with the right intention.

I always kept myself fairly fit.

It's weird: I don't see myself as a tough guy.

I'm the great-great-grandson of a sheep stealer.

Getting the call from Ridley Scott made me think that sometimes you just need to go to work.

I remember my brother Nash had just directed me in 'The Square,' and I was sitting in Australia going: 'No one's called me about working for ages. I don't know if I'm ever going to get another job.'

Australians and the British are very similar: If you try and stand out in any way, and you try to reach for success, someone is gonna be there to cut you down.

I'm on the list that I thought I'd never be on. I'm not sitting here thinking, 'God, I might get this part' or 'is it too late for me to play Hamlet?' It's really about: who do I get to work with? There's so many people on that list.

So many people wait around for funding, and if they're unsuccessful, they don't make the film; if you've got a good idea, that seems so pointless. There's always a way of doing it; you've just got to find it.

I think the great thing about religion is it's there to teach us the good path and that we're all equal, that we should be treated as such.

I love what I do, but it occurs to me I may have handed over a large portion of my life to fiction.

I'm not scared of doing movies that are just about entertainment. I'm not scared of doing movies that are really challenging and cover difficult terrain. I just want good experiences and I want to challenge myself and I want to just keep learning, as an actor.

Sometimes, the smaller roles in movies can be the most interesting. If you only take the stance that you'll only play central characters in movies, you'll find yourself not being able to indulge in that morally grey terrain that makes support characters so rich and interesting.

When I was young, I had a very clear point of view on things in life, on moral questions. There was a black and white viewpoint on my world. As I've gotten older, I see the grey areas appear.

The tricky thing becomes: Do you know yourself well enough to then portray that on screen? And for me, I find that really hard. I'd rather hide behind accents and funny walks.

I can't sing or dance.

I really believe guilt finds its way out of a person.

The sum total of all my stop-starts have made me less concerned about the future. I'm just aware now that I'll always land on my feet somehow.

There's the pressure of being a No. 1 on the call sheet, being a lead actor. There's almost this feeling like being captain of the team. You want to put a bit of energy into actually setting a good example.

'The Great Gatsby' ticked so many boxes for me.

You have to stick to what you love and purse that at all costs. Don't choose money first; it won't make you happy.

If I knew my schedule a month ahead, I'd be so bored.

I'm hardly digging trenches for a living. I'm getting to tap into my boyhood fantasies of being a larger-than-life character.

I operate under the theory that all publicity is good publicity, and then, if that theory doesn't work, you just say that any newspaper article ends up on the bottom of the parrot cage. But, of course, you can't line a parrot cage with Internet bloggers, can you?

I tend to take on a lot of things. And then they all just seem to happen at once. Or maybe I'm not good at saying 'No'. But the juggling's fun.

I never really think too much about my voice.

Part of me wonders what it would have been like to have had my first experience of India in a normal way, rather than through the eyes of a film.

There's a certain relief to just being the guy who puts on the costume and walks onset and gets to prance or stomp around in a Ridley Scott or Baz Luhrmann movie.

I've signed four autographs for Sam Worthington in L.A., and I haven't told any of the people that I'm not him.

I couldn't do 'Eleanor Rigby' because it was clashing with another project - something I was going to go do - something with Liv Ullmann.

Sometimes Hollywood manages to knock a movie in its teeth so hard that it never manages to get back up.

I reckon I would be able compare anything to anything else if you gave me enough time.

Sometimes I think being an actor is like being a dog for a director; it's like they throw a stick, and you want to fetch it and bring it back to them. You want a pat on the head for it.

It's funny how sometimes you learn things off the Internet before they're actually told to you.

If I'm going to work for twelve hours a day, I want twelve hours of awesomeness!

Whenever you deal with science fiction you are setting up a world of rules. I think you work hard to establish the rules. And you also have to work even harder to maintain those rules, and within that find excitement and unpredictability and all that stuff.

I grew up being taught, 'Do unto others as they would do unto you.' I would get scolded for not being polite.

When people are really great at what they do there is no aggression because they are comfortable in their own skin. They know themselves well enough that you don't have anything to prove.

I find it strange when people can't relate to kids, because you were a kid once, you know?

I have an issue with the commercial aspect of moviemaking: I don't see why a movie can't make a lot of money and also be good.

The nature of human beings is that we're competitive, and the chances are there's someone out there who's going to work harder than you and want it more than you.

I worked for a big department store, and strangely, on my first day, they put me in charge of Christmas wrapping. I didn't know how to wrap a present and make it not look like it fell off a truck.

I just don't want to do crap movies, man, because I just love that I can get up and talk about them and talk to journalists about stuff that I'm really proud of.

Particularly when you're making a movie of a book, people are always waiting with their knives - you know?

There's a real sense of fighting and destruction in our DNA that we don't get in touch with.

It's tricky. I've never been standing at the top of the tree with tons of money thrown at me. I've never really had a profile. So in a way I have this 'nothing to lose' attitude.

I don't call acting a real job, and writing is a hobby.

I don't want at the end of my life to look back at just a bunch of fictional movies I was involved in that kept taking me away from the real world.

I did have someone tell me that I looked like Conan O'Brien. I was like, 'What?'

To me, 'Warrior' was a real turning point - probably one of the greatest experiences I've ever had as an actor on set.

North America makes a ton of movies and there's a ton of movies that are exceptional.

The Australians are actually the worst of the criminals from the United Kingdom, but not worst as in toughest. They're the ones who did stupid little things and got caught for it. Bad criminals.

Cultures render their icons in their own image. Which comes down to vanity, in some sense.

I remember being bullied at school, and I remember being cruel to other kids.

That's one of the great privileges, being an actor, is that someone pays you and sends you off to learn about something that otherwise you'd never know about.

The narrator of a documentary often comes in at the last minute and takes some of the glory they don't deserve.

I wanted to make a movie that was kind of a tribute to the way I feel when I watch a John Hughes movie.

You can road-test relationships.

Really, no-one is bad except for serial killers and dictators.

To me, I think I'm just going to keep focused and forward on what I'm doing, work-wise, rather than searching for any kind of meaning in it.