Playing Mark Antony in 'Rome' will always be a favourite of mine because he was such an outrageously big and interesting character to play. Also, the fact that we were able, with that character, to find out and present the public with a biography of that man that had not been really seen before.
A voice and an accent are two very different things. The voice of a man is how he speaks from his heart, right in the middle of him... And then you stick an accent on top of that.
I ran into my old friend Michael Kenneth Williams, who I worked with on a show called 'The Philanthropist' for NBC. He was going to be doing this show called 'Hap and Leonard.' He was playing Leonard, and they were looking for somebody to play Hap.
Airport security is a particular bugbear. At the risk of sounding like a grumpy old man, while I can see that averting terrorism is manifestly important, the measures taken seem, simultaneously, absurd.
If you find yourself always playing the villain, or if you find yourself being typecast into a corner where you're not happy then that's probably rather miserable, but if I have been typecast I am quite happy about it.
I do live a weirdly divided life, because I'm not a Hollywood superstar, I don't live on Malibu Beach, I don't do massive 'OK!' spreads, I don't go to premieres and parties that much.
When I was growing up, 'Butch and Sundance' was my absolute favorite film.
Dieting isn't complicated: if you eat 2,000 calories, you have to burn it off; simple as that.
If you look around us, there are an awful lot of men out there, and women, but mostly men, who believe that they have got a fast-track path to Heaven, if they do the things that they believe God is telling them to do, and I don't just mean Islamic people. I mean Fundamentalist Christians.
I grew up in a very rural community in England.
I was fortunate enough to do an HBO show, 'Rome,' in which my arc was built in by historical fact, and over the course of 22 episodes, we were able to tell the stories of these people. We had a beginning and middle and end, and as we went on, you changed every week.
I have no problem with television as a genre.
There are only a few TV networks that really invest in production in the way that I think they should. HBO, obviously, is one of them.
One of the great things about being an actor is that you have a completely different challenge every few months.
Decide very early on: do you want to be an actor or do you want to be famous? Because they're very different routes.
I really do want to just be able to sit in the corner of the pub with my friends... to just be an actor and still go to the supermarket and not get bothered.
I think the older I get, the less I should be doing.
Somerset is where I call home, and where I feel most myself.
Hospitals are very extreme places - you can be in a maternity room one minute, and by someone's bedside as they're dying the next.
I really like playing people who are exciting to watch and who burn brightly.
