What's exciting is there's a curtain that divides the audience from this other world. You want to see behind.
Nobody's really unsympathetic, I think. People do good and bad things. If a character's totally unsympathetic, they're not real and I'm not interested. Even the real monsters have to have a spark of something you can relate to.
My vanity is I'm terribly romantic! But being married is lovely.
I wouldn't want to leave it so long before doing a play again, I get very stolid and sluggish if I do too much telly.
I have felt some twinges recently, about parts I wanted to play that I may be getting too old and fat to do. 'Hamlet,' for example - maybe that's gone. I would love to play Richard II.
People like to think that actors are terribly worried about ghosts of other actors in the parts they play. But you just have to get on with it.
I did four or five years in telly, and by the end of it was drained. I was a bit sick of myself. I didn't feel like an actor anymore. That sounds silly, but when you're doing a play you're using different muscles, and it blew all the cobwebs away.
The security comes, as an actor, in knowing that you're not in control. If you try to control your career, or how people perceive you, you'll make yourself unhappy, because life doesn't work like that. So much is luck. It's much better to let yourself off, to think, 'There's nothing I can do.'
Apart from earning an awful lot of money, why would you go to Hollywood?
It must be odd, being recognisable. I would hate to lose that anonymity. It happened for a while with 'Spooks.' No one notices me now.
There's always a concern as an actor that you'll be boring unless your character is swinging from a chandelier.
You'd never play Hamlet if you started worrying about who's played it before you.
I think people ought to do what they feel useful at the time. If I do things because I ought to do them, I switch off.
I think it sits quite happily with me, the condition of being an actor. I see some people getting quite eaten up with it, with the insecurities. There are times when I long for continuity and stability, but I also love the idea of not knowing what I'll be doing next - or even if I'm going to work.
I'd auditioned for the National Youth Theatre and I didn't get a place and it was terrifying.
You never know how films are going to do and it is daunting if I think about it.
It's a real skill to be able to publicise yourself.
I don't feel like a romantic lead; I guess I feel more like a character actor.
Nobody's just arrogant. I've met people who are embattled and dismissive, but when you get to know them, you find that they're vulnerable - that that hauteur or standoffishiness is because they're pedaling furiously underneath.
The actor in me would always like to be more dashing, or slimmer, or have nicer hair.
