Clive Owen on Advancing in Acting: The Best Career Move is To Be Good & Hungry

Clive Owen is all suited up and looking handsome on the cover of GQ‘s first ever age issue for October 2014, on newsstands now.

Here’s what the 49-year-old The Knick actor had to share with the mag:

On never wanting to retire: “No. Whatever age you are, there’s a role that’s about who you are and where you are. There’s parts for that age that you’ll be rich, that you can bring things to. So unless I was incapable, I imagine myself still working, yeah.”

On “career moves”: “There’s a little period in my career where I kind of lost sight of it a little bit. Acting, like a lot of things in life, is so much about appetite�”wanting to do it, feeling you can do it, feeling like you’ve got something to do. An appetite, a hunger for it. You start making choices based on a career, a “career move”�”I don’t even know what that is�”thinking that’s the right thing to do or whatever. I don’t function very well if I just respond to the material goal. If I have the appetite, it doesn’t matter how the whole thing pans out. Good, bad, it’s the appetite that carries you through it. The best career move is to be good, and the best way to be good is to be hungry for it, to want to do it.”

On thinking there’s nothing after death: “I think we’re struggling to make sense of something that never really does make sense, is my theory. Anything post�”this life is a desperate attempt to make sense of something that doesn’t really make sense. Life is scarily random, and that’s what I believe. I believe we shape all these things to make us feel a bit better about it. I don’t shape anything. I think when it ends, it ends. When I think about it, I think the reverberations of us as people carry on through other people.”

For more from Clive, visit GQ.com.