I love working fast. I don't relish the director who wants to do 25 to 30 takes, or the actors who insist on doing 25 or 30 takes.

I love theater work because of the immediate effect your performance has on the audience. And I love the repetition, I love getting on the same stage for more than a month and reciting the same lines, trying to make a small or large step towards an improvement in my acting.

Even at drama school if there was a part of some eastern European thug it would be me.

I love working fast. I don't relish the director who wants to do 25 to 30 takes, or the actors who insist on doing 25 or 30 takes.

I think, because of my background, which is slightly more exotic than the average British actor, I think, I sort of occupied this little niche quite early on of playing the foreign guy. It started way back at drama school, I played an Eastern European heavy, I played the Russian mobster. And I have done all those different ethnic roles, and I think it's partly because of my look, I think I've got an adaptable sort of nondescript ethnicity, which you can't quite pin down, but it's enough to kind of get a flavor of something.

When I look back on my career - if that's what it is - it looks a bit like a crazy quilt, and I think it's just really because, when one job has finished, I've never really been in a position where I had three or four options.

I like doing everything - theater and film, radio and TV, comedy and tragedy. I love it all. And I've never really planned anything - I've always looked at my job in a rather simplistic way. It's like being a plumber. One day you might be fixing an early 20th century showerhead that requires real detailed work. The other day you might just be clearing a sewer. Both jobs are very different, but all the tools come out of the same box. That's the way I look at acting.