Marton Csokas, swimming with Hollywood sharks nzherald.co.nz September 14th, 2002 By RUSSELL BAILLIE Marton Csokas is in no great rush. Unfortunately his career is. While he expands on subjects tangential to the reason for this transtasman phone interview - why this former star of the Auckland stage and Shortland Street is chewing up the scenery as Yorgi, the fabulously Russian villain of the hit action flick XXX (see story below) - the clock on the movie publicity's machine ticks loudly in the background. It's perhaps a mark of the league he's now in that Csokas is allowed only 20 minutes for the hometown media. Still, in that time we cover his thoughts on the floods in Europe (much of XXX was filmed in Prague before the devastation), Russian acting guru Stanislavsky, his casting in three of the biggest movies of recent times and his last-minute excision from one of them. Oh, and how his attitude to acting has changed since he was treading the boards of the Maidment, appearing in the Speights ads, popping up on Xena, or playing Dr Leonard Dodds, the funniest character of his era - or since - on our deathless soap. "I think I am taking it less seriously and with a larger sense of humour. That's been a very big lesson. I think that's the best thing. And not so much analysis - I analyse things naturally or analyse things as part of my personality, and so I've eased up on that and embraced things rather than trying to figure out how it all works - from an acting perspective this is. And I've enriched my work experience and my own life with a larger sense of humour. Those two things have been very important." | |
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