Actor Max von Sydow (The Wrap)

In an interview with The Wrap, the 82-year-old actor talks about his new role as a silent man in “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close,” director Stephen Daldry’s adaptation of a Jonathan Safran Foer novel about the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attack in New York City.

In the interview, the Swedish-born von Sydow calls the film “a wonderful story about healing after this terrible tragedy,” as a young man traverses New York, trying to make sense of the attacks, in which his father perished.

“And I think it’s a brilliant idea to let the boy sort of invent his own therapy. Which he sticks to fanatically. He is totally convinced that what he’s doing will lead to some sort of an answer, some sort of a solution,” von Sydow notes.

In the piece, he also reflects on his decades-long career in cinema and the challenges posed by being a European actor in Hollywood:

“… Okay, I’m a foreigner. I’m not American, I’m not English. So they come and offer me the foreigner. Who is the foreigner in the story? The foreigner is most of the time the villain. And very often he’s the Nazi. And then funnily enough, they also ask me to play Jewish refugees. So it’s sort of two poles, in a sense,” he said.

Read the full story here.