Molina on Spartacus

We’re always tickled by the entries in the Guardian’s Films That Changed My Life series, in which directors and actors wax eloquent about the films that have been most formative for them. This week, the publication asked actor Alfred Molina (Prick Up Your Ears, Frida) to contribute. His choice is Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus , which he remembers seeing at age eleven or twelve. “Much to my parents’ consternation, it was the first film to make me utter those fateful words: ‘I want to be an actor,’” Molina writes of this seminal swords-and-sandals epic.  As he goes on to explain, it wasn’t Kirk Douglas’s athleticism or the film’s muscular heroics that elicited this response; rather, “the storytelling and its humanity lit that spark within me.”