Sharlto Copley
Sharlto Copley
Sharlto Copleyis a South African actor, producer and director who has produced and co-directed short films that have appeared at the Cannes Film Festival, as well as commercials and music videos. He is perhaps best known for playing the roles of Wikus van der Merwe in the Oscar-nominated science fiction film District 9, Howling Mad Murdock in the 2010 adaptation of The A-Team, Agent C.M. Kruger in the science fiction film Elysium, James Corrigan in the science fiction horror film...
NationalitySouth African
ProfessionMovie Actor
Date of Birth27 November 1973
CityPretoria, South Africa
You need that marketing power. You need to go do the interviews. You need to put yourself out there and risk and be open to the fact that people are going to not like you, and they are just going to rip you apart, and whatever you say in an interview can get quoted out of context.
I think every soft child in the world gets damaged. All of of us come into the world and get damaged. It's just a matter of how much.
I always find the more you can draw on real life characters, people, situations, it works better. Certainly for designing a character, I prefer to draw on real people rather than other guys I've seen in movies, rather than 'here's my version of Clint Eastwood' or whoever.
To some degree, Hollywood doesn't know what to do with me because the characters I do are so different. But hopefully, that will give me longevity.
To be honest, I'm probably more of a comedy person, actually. I really enjoy the comedy stuff, and I've got some things I'll be working on that I think are just different ways of combining genres in comedy and drama and action.
I'm not interested in going to casting after casting, trying to get into that game. So there is a part of me that knows that I will do more characters, even if I have to produce those projects myself to get those projects out there. If the right characters come along, I would love to. I would jump at the chance.
I walked out of... was it 'Stardust?' That thing with the witches? I was so looking forward to it, but I just couldn't handle it, man. Ten minutes in, and I was gone. I didn't have to walk out of 'Transformers 2' because I didn't go. I loved the first 'Transformers.' I loved it, but I heard too many of my friends walked out of the second one.
Villains are not fun for me to play, as such. But caricature-ish, intense behaviors that are based on real human traits are interesting. That makes an interesting story.
That's what a powerful story does. It creates a more intense experience of life for you to watch. That's what a good film does for me, anyway. That process, I enjoy. It just makes for entertaining characters and entertaining films.
The accent is always critical for me because it informs a lot of the character.
My combined experiences, doing different films, has made me very concerned about and interested in how you protect your creative self when the work, by default, is going to be judged by people.
You aren't always going to make stuff that everybody does. The sooner that you just realize that and accept that, the better. At best, hopefully, you will like it, every time, and that might not even happen. It's the nature of your work. It's just what comes with it. So, it makes it easier to deal with anybody criticizing you or anything thinking you're wonderful when you realize that you just need to focus in this one area, which is your creative fulfillment and enjoyment.
Hopefully, you'll be able to find enough of an audience, each time, that you can keep working, rather than getting caught up in the Hollywood system, which can so quickly become about how much money something makes and how many people went to watch it. It's very alluring. It's such a powerful machine that's playing on you, the whole time.
I love comedy. I suppose comedy is my first love, in a way. I did a lot of acting, funnily enough, unprofessionally, as a kid. From when I was 10 years old until I was about 19, I was always doing little sketches with my friends, and doing different accents and voices. Probably about 3/4 of those were comedic, in some way, and the other 1/4 was more serious stuff or more action or more dramatic little pieces that I would make. But, I tend to lean towards comedy.