I love perfumes. Every morning when my girlfriend and I come down to the courtyard in our block of flats we're assailed by the most delicious scent - jasmine round a doorway. It almost makes me swoon.

I have every sympathy for writers. It's a mystery to me what they do. I can edit. I can cross out and say, 'I'm not saying that' or, 'How about we move this to here? Wouldn't that make that bit of the story better?' But where any of it comes from is beyond me. I will never write a play or a novel.

Do you know that moment when you paint a landscape as a child and, when you're maybe under seven or something, the sky is just a blue stripe across the top of the paper? And then there's that somewhat disappointing moment when the teacher tells you that the sky actually comes down in amongst all the branches. And it's like life changes at that moment and becomes much more complicated and a little bit more boring, as it's rather tedious to fill in the branches.

The directors you trust the most are the ones, when you ask them a question, they've got the guts to say, 'I don't know.'

I was coming from a very cerebral, dark, difficult, layered play by Christopher Hampton and doing an action movie in Hollywood (Die Hard) with explosions, and I was holding a gun.

Acting touches nerves you have absolutely no control over.

I'm very aware that when one is acting in the theater, you do become kind of animal about it. And you're reliant on instincts rather than tact a lot of the time.