When I was in theater I was forever trying to inhabit a space which puts yourself under the microscope as an actor and your personality and your take on life, but actually through another portal of a character.

Motion capture is exactly what it says: it's physical moves, whereas performance capture is the entire performance - including your facial performance. If you're doing, say, martial arts for a video game, that is motion capture. This is basically another way of recording an actor's performance: audio, facial and physical.

You're watching your kids playing football and you're not present. It's like the worst... it's horrible. I despise myself for it. I think it's a particularly male thing. Being present and in the moment with your kids is something a lot of men struggle with.

My agent told me they were casting for the voice of Gollum. I hadnt read The Lord of the Rings, but I read the script and realized what an amazing role it was. I developed a voice for the audition tape, then met Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh at the auditions and fell in love with them both.

I've done a fair amount of that stuff... when we did 'Lord of the Rings' the transformation sequence from Smeagol to Gollum was a 19-hour make-up job. You have to have a kind of zen button that you press and allow the mind to be focused in a certain way.

The learning curve is 'The Hobbit' is being shot in 3D.

I'm in the early stages of a film called 'Freezing Time' about Eadweard Muybridge, the Victorian photographer who was really the forefather of cinema. Digital animators still treat his images like the Bible. He was a very obsessed man.