“I won a line dancing competition when I was 12, and I won a cassette tape of some of the best of line dancing hits.” [2022]

“Sometimes these days can be fairly long, and kind of exhausting, and sometimes, for us actors, we have to find infinite variations on the same answers. So I thought ‘What better way to introduce a little bit of some beautiful chaos than get a cockatoo?’.” [On why he was holding his cockatoo, Shaka, during the interview junket for The Umbrella Academy, 2022]

“I like my meditation, I like cooking, I like writing about any old thing, because you get into a nice sense of flow, a nice sense of dissolve quite easily that way. I like reading books, I’m reading a good one at the moment called ‘The Wisdom of Insecurity’ by Alan Watts. It was written in the 60s, when everyone was terrified we were gonna blow up the entire planet.” [On how he takes care of himself and shows self-love, 2022]

“At the odd Comic Con, I’ve met people who’ve gone the whole way and committed my face to their flash for the rest of their lives.” [About fan tattoos, 2020]

“I like having a nice mess around, trying to catch people unaware, catch them off guard, sort of throw a few curveballs into the mix. Scenes can go for hours filming, and so spontaneity becomes like oxygen after a while.” [On improvising while filming The Umbrella Academy, 2020]

“It came about from many chats in parks in Toronto, and over training and stuff. We were very interested in food, and health, what’s being fed to us in the mainstream versus what technologies and stuff are revealing more and more to be a more optimal way of living.” [About deciding to create The Earth Podcast with Tom Hopper and Byron Knight, 2020]

“Don’t pathologize adversity too acutely – happiness and sorrow all come in the same parcel, prosperity and adversity is no different. So there’s always, I think, unforeseen value in adversity.” [About staying positive, 2020]

“Sometimes I see actors taking lots of middle distance pauses and sighs and stuff, and basically dropping their cues… which in theatre is a mortal sin. Unless there’s a reason for it, you pick up the cue – at the end of that line, you say your line. Because there’s people listening, there’s an audience.” [2020]

“Do you know what my agent said to me fairly early on? ‘Never try to explain acting, because you’ll come across either crazy or boring’.” [2020]

“I know I’m a different person in the morning to who I am in the evening. I wake up and I have this overwhelming need to get things done. I need to be mechanical about slowing myself down in the mornings… […] that kind of self knowledge has made me realize I am a more annoying person in the morning than I am the rest of the day.” [2020]

“When you’re an actor, there’s a lot of doing weird stuff alone in a room, trying to figure out the physicality, and the voice, you know, how this person might hold themselves and why. So I did lots of video diaries, and writing down stuff as the character, trying to get into an automatic writing sense… but, to be honest, I don’t know if any of that helped.” [On preparing for his roles, particularly for Klaus in The Umbrella Academy, 2019]

“I just saw some stuff, and it did turn my stomach. I thought ‘You’re too old for this sort of reaction, Rob’, but I’m a human being. When you see all that stuff written down, represented by what is perceived as a global community… that’s the problem with social media, we assume that it reflects people. But it doesn’t, I don’t think it does, I think it encourages the lower, more negative part of our nature. Not always! But…” [On reading hateful messages on social media, 2020]

“Psychological theories that help people out of chronic agoraphobia, chronic anxiety and all those things, like CBT, all start out in the basis that you are not defined by your actions, you’re defined by the fact that you’re intrinsically a human being, who’s alive, who has as much right to be alive as every other human being. And we should never, ever, ever go through life defining each other by our actions, because we’re animals, and if we’re pushed hard enough, we’re gonna have a response.” [2020]

“I think social media is excellent… for memes, and for funny stuff. But for nuanced subjects, like the murder of George Floyd, and institutional racism, this is the wrong platform to be having those conversations on, because you can’t be nuanced. There’s no context to your statement, it’s just inside a box, being separated from everything else.” [2020]

“… Don’t question me on my sources! I can’t remember. This might have been a dream. But, like everything I say on this podcast, it could have been something I fabricated – so please go and validate all the stuff I spout as fact.” [His lighthearted response after being questioned about where one of the many random anecdotes he’s shared on The Earth Locker came from, 2020]

“I went to Cambodia once, and I went to an internet cafe where you put your feet in fish tanks beneath the computers, and these fish eat all of the dead skin off your feet. But they’ll also eat scabs, and cuts and things, so you have to cover any cuts with plasters. […] And the lady next to me – the fish opened up her foot. I was in the middle of an email, and I looked down and there was a big pool of blood in the tank.” [2020]

“Eating fructose corn syrup/sugar and all of that… it’s like a bad one night stand, isn’t it? You might pop off for 10, 15 minutes, but afterwards you feel tired and ashamed.” [2020]

“I think sometimes I make aspects of my life more complicated than they have to be, because I’m just flaky about what I actually want. I think I’m very noncommittal about the future… and so, to my own detriment, I mistrust the idea of plans too much.” [2020]

“I will always involve my parents in all parts of my life, whether I’m slightly embarrassed or whatever else, because I don’t want them to drift off. I don’t wanna have to shrink any of my own proportions when I go home.” [2020]

“I used to get auditions, and it might have been for some big Hollywood movie, and if it was something spectacular and expensive, I used to think ‘They’re not gonna cast me’. That was just the baseline belief, and it took years to get over it.” [2020]

“It was nice. I felt like, if we were anymore relaxed with each other, we’d be in coma.” [About working with the cast of The Umbrella Academy, 2022]

“I think Klaus is going to end up working in a nursing home, doing hospice palliative care. Just helping people pass the border from life to death, being like ‘Don’t worry! I’ve been there, it’s nice’.” [Guessing the future of Klaus, his character in The Umbrella Academy, 2022]

“Our scripts change. Scenes might be cut, or they might expand, morph, you know… so, as it happens, in the lead up to the day of filming, you get replacement pages to slot into your episode. So the pages go from white, blue, to green, to pink, to yellow sometimes. That many small changes, so that everybody is up to speed.” [About The Umbrella Academy, 2022]

“It’s a testament to Klaus’ melodrama that he needed to conquer death in order to improve his self-respect.” [About The Umbrella Academy, 2022]

“I don’t know if there’s any point to comparing one season to another season… Elliot was at a stage in his journey back then, he’s at another stage in his journey now, so to kind of rank them in a scoreboard seems inauthentic, to be honest.” [About working with Elliot Page through multiple seasons of The Umbrella Academy, 2022]

“I thank my lucky stars that I’m in a show that’s so slick-looking. It’s very slick and reassuringly expensive-looking.” [About The Umbrella Academy, 2022]

“If you got a clone of yourself, and then, a couple of weeks later, the clone went ‘No, I’m the original’… how would you know that you’re the original?” [About Klaus’ and his siblings’ existential crisis on the 3rd season of The Umbrella Academy, 2022]

“Steve [Blackman] would constantly send me text message threats saying ‘Next time I kill you, that’s it, done, you’re not coming back’. But I can’t be killed off, man! I’m immortal!” [About filming Klaus’ multiple death sequence in the 3rd season of The Umbrella Academy, 2022]

“Death is nothing on this show. Reginald Hargreeves has been dead since Season 1 Episode 1.” [About The Umbrella Academy, 2022]

“They were never in the real world and they can’t hope to be there in the future.” [About the Hargreeves siblings from The Umbrella Academy, 2022]

“As I’ve gone through life, my desires have changed, my beliefs have changed, so I’m very reticent to predict what I would want or not want in the future. You know, in the interests of security and comfort, we can sometimes try to make the future a fixed place. My ideal happy ending, I suppose, for Klaus is that he’s continuing to understand that there is no point in trying to fix the future or putting any kind of face on it, because that’s just putting blinkers on the real nature of reality.” [About The Umbrella Academy, 2022]

“A big shout out to the editors of Umbrella, in fairness. They make us look more attractive, slick and funny than we actually are.” [About The Umbrella Academy, 2022]

“The cult’s function, I suppose, in the Klaus story, is ultimately so Ben can end up wearing me like a prophylactic.” [About Klaus being a cult leader in the Season 2 of The Umbrella Academy, 2021]

“I suppose if you’re someone who’s desperately in need of people to follow you, if you’re an insecure person who can’t be alone with themselves, you either take drugs or you start a cult. And the drugs nearly killed Klaus, so he went on to do a cult instead. So the cult is sort of like a substitute for the drugs, to kind of mask the pain he feels, the loss of Dave, who was probably the only person he’s ever loved more than himself.” [About Klaus’ journey in the Season 2 of The Umbrella Academy, 2021]

“Me and Steve had talked a fair bit between seasons, sort of throwing ideas around about, you know, Klaus being at his most interesting when he’s kind of at that turn of change, when he’s sort of in the process of transformation to something else… which is very vague language for saying that he’s sort of a chimera of a creature. If he’s resting anywhere for too long, he starts to spin, and is looking for his next incarnation.” [About his character in The Umbrella Academy, 2020]

“Our Klaus is somewhat of a narcissist. So we were like… a cult leader could well be a legit… specially for doing 1960s, you know, that would be a very kind of obvious way to go with Klaus. It would have been surprising if he didn’t end up a cult leader.” [About Klaus’ storyline in the Season 2 of The Umbrella Academy, 2020]

“When they cast me, I think they were up for the idea that I was gonna bring a lot of chaotic wildness, and they just let me run with it, they really indulged any lunacy that I’d come up with or hatch on the day. So that was really fun, just feeling completely unrestricted. And whenever you have a feeling of restriction or inhibition, you just transfer it into something else, and go ‘Actually, I don’t need to listen to that voice, because I’m playing Klaus, and I can be and do anything’, and that was the philosophy that permeated his look, his behaviour. But really, people who do that, there’s a fragility to them, you know. So you started off with this slightly insane character, who’s kind of falling apart at the seams, but then you start to see the soft, and gooey, and traumatised center of the character as the thing goes on. It was a lot to play around with. There were many colors on Klaus’ palette, I think.” [About Klaus’ storyline in the Season 2 of The Umbrella Academy, 2019]

“I think I’d keep my distance, to be honest, because you’ll either get robbed or stabbed.” [About what would be his reaction to meeting Klaus and Diego from The Umbrella Academy in real life, 2019]

“I didn’t have to do anything, it was great. The macho lads had to do all the fight choreography and all the extra work. They were like ‘Do as little as you possibly can. The less you do, the better’, and I was very dedicated.” [On his physical preparation to play Klaus in The Umbrella Academy, 2019]

“The powers are interesting, because they by themselves are variations of things we’ve seen before. But I think what’s very interesting and unique about the show is that the characters that have the powers have a fallibility behind them so that they misuse their powers, because Reginald Hargreeves never taught these people to be people, he didn’t teach them how to be emotionally stable. They all have these abilities, but they don’t know how to be human beings behind them, how to wield them correctly, responsibly, whatever. So they end up doing huge damage to their supposedly normal lives.” [About how The Umbrella Academy approaches the superhero genre, 2019]

“I was completely taken back by how the film turned out. I couldn’t quantify it in terms of good or bad, because it was so explicitly violent. That wasn’t something I was expecting, it was so extraordinarily violent. […] I think I hadn’t seen anything of that explicitness for a bit. I was drunk, and they sort of coaxed us up on stage and gave us microphones, and they were like ‘So! What did you think?’. And I really learned that lesson, which was: never watch the film for the first time with an audience. And this isn’t to say that I didn’t enjoy it, really, it was just so shocking.” [About watching Moonwalkers for the first time at the SXSW Festival, 2020]