I expect at some point I'll probably want to go back on stage and do some theater, because I've not done theater in 10 years.

When you have children, you realize that at the end it's all about passing on, about handing down. The process of letting go, not attachment, but appreciating the beauty and value in the change, the transformation.

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.

It's a different rhythm than most movies. For a lot of the actors, you're 12,000 miles away from home. It becomes a way of life - getting up at five in the morning, shooting every day, day in day out, for 270 days. The new cast playing the dwarves were carrying incredibly heavy weights in their suits, they sat through hours of make-up every day. So it's quite challenging from a stamina point of view.

I never felt totally, 100%, patriotically English... I'd seen a lot of the world by an early age - sort of spent a lot of time traveling around Lebanon and I'd seen Babylon, and Damascus, and all sorts of places in the Middle East by the time I was ten. Then we'd return to Ruslip in West London... Done a fair bit of traveling really.

For film and games, there is now a fantastic method of actors portraying characters which don't necessarily look like themselves. And yet you've still got the heart and soul of the performance.

I think there will always be a particular generation of actors who think that they're going to be replaced by robots. But certainly the emerging actors understand that that's part of the craft.