You're immortal, aren't you, until you get a little peek over the precipice. The thought of death...You're not supposed to start pondering it until you're old. And there's nothing like being told you've got a life-threatening disease to concentrate your mind on that.
I think anything that increases your understanding of the human condition... I think age and life, if you're lucky, makes you think deeper, and the other thing it makes you realize is that you never stop learning, and you never lose your fear of getting it wrong.
My wife... now travels with me everywhere - not because she nearly lost me, but because my kids are all grown up and my son is now a very successful actor, Rafe Spall.
I don't play the lottery, as I feel I have been really lucky in what I have been able to do in my life, but if I did win, it would be the usual things - helping out the people I love. I'd probably squander a few quid on all sorts of unnecessary crap!
Eccentricity is usually owned by middle-class and upper-class people. If you are working class and eccentric, then you're just mad.
When I was born, my dad was a scaffolder, and my mum worked in a chip shop. Then my mum taught herself how to be a hairdresser and ended up with her own salon; my dad became a postman and then a counter clerk. Our first house didn't have a bathroom.
I think people's imaginations are being neutered by the amount of access they can get to information just by pressing a button.
It doesn't bother me one iota that most of my career has been playing people who are not that - well, let's say that people wouldn't aspire to be like them.
In 1996, when I was being treated for leukaemia, at one point I had a vicious infection that was trying to claim me. Mercifully, due to love and expertise, I pulled through.
As you get older and more thoughtful, you carry stuff with you. Your kids get older, you take on their sorrows, you enjoy their triumphs. Life doesn't always go to plan.
If one wants to measure oneself by the facile accruement of awards, then I've done very well.
Imagination is a beast that has to be put in a cage.
My job as a character actor is to make me fit the character, to serve the character. To present this human being who turns up in a piece of film or entertainment that's going, you know, exist as if it might exist after the film is finished and it existed before the film has started.
What character actors want to do is investigate new types of people and present them in all their idiosyncrasies, psychological complexities, and contradictory stupidities. That has been one of the great delights over our seven collaborations.
I'm working class, and want people to know I'm not unintelligent and all the other cliches that come with it.
I didn't know whether to join the army or go to art college.
You invent this massive lagoon of information without any pressure to do anything apart from create this person, a person that might fit the bill that is the character that is emerging from the research.
I played Othello at RADA - blacked up. I didn't know it was going to be offensive now!
I believe that a world that doesn't have some kind of magic in it wouldn't be worth living in.
When you're doing a film, your agent and manager spend hours - days - talking about contractual obligations. If you turn up for work and ask for a peeled grape on top of foie gras but you don't get it, you can't get annoyed.
