THE STAGE WAS WHERE STORIES FIRST BECAME REAL TO ME.

As a child, I was always performing. I played in school theatre, invented characters and stepped into other worlds. By the age of seven, I knew what I wanted: to act, to make theatre and films — to immerse myself in stories, shape characters and give emotions a life beyond my own.

From drama school to the present day, theatre has remained one of the foundations of my artistic work. As an actor, writer and director, I have brought many plays to the stage. Of all of them, Samuel Beckett’s WAITING FOR GODOT has been the most important to me. In its radical simplicity, its humour and despair, it reveals what theatre can be: two human beings, an almost empty stage — and the whole of existence.

As deeply as I love cinema, the stage will always remain a part of me. Film preserves a moment. Theatre must create it anew — alive, immediate and unrepeatable — every single night.