Did you recognize any of yourself in Mati’s role? How did it feel to play this person, and how did it affect you emotionally?
Mati’s character was interesting for me foremost because he is intellectually much smarter than I am. As Mati, I can think more existential and sad and beautiful thoughts. Mati is an old school intellectual, whose record collection is composed of classical music and whose home is between books. He’s a man for whom anything external is secondary. A man who doesn’t have disdain for the external, he doesn’t even think about what he eats, wears, drinks, or smokes. Sometimes he discovers himself eating children’s sausage and observes this from afar. He sees archetypal symbols everywhere, rather than commodities. Simplicity and unthinking sincerity are strangers to him, he tends to over-intellectualize and that brings him trouble. He has an extremely vain internal ego which is reflected in his rhetoric and creation. At one moment he even understands this and admits that he only loves himself. Playing Mati was a psychotherapeutic experience: preparation for the day when everything will be worse, and what the options will be then. Even though my personal preferred means of expression is humor, the absurd, and self-irony, as an actor, drama seems to be a more appropriate genre for me.
