People have the idea of missionaries as going out with the Bible and hitting natives with it. It's not really what they were doing. They were all doing something rather different.

I'm fully aware that if I were to change professions tomorrow, become an astronaut and be the first man to land on Mars, the headlines in the newspapers would read: `Mr. Darcy Lands on Mars.

The skill of a good actor is to make it always seem like you're in that fantastically spontaneous moment. Very often, a stand-up comedian has a different instinct, which is to reinvent. Once you've laid down some material, and made them laugh, you move on and find some new material.

In filming you're waiting. You're waiting for lights. You're waiting for people set things up. And when you're not waiting, you're repeating. And neither is conducive to spontaneity, you know. Comedy makes you very, very neurotic because you think, I - but did I nail it?

I never saw myself as Mr. Ugly, but I'm not that handsome. I can sort of be made to look quite a lot better or quite a lot worse.

It didn't have to be a newfound respect for the craft, I knew that it's notoriously difficult and frightens a lot of people off. I don't think anyone knows quite who to attribute it to, but the dying actor who says: "dying is easy, comedy is hard." I hear it.

I think it helps to get a film made because people who put money in are nervous. They like to have something recognisable enough to make them secure that there's a pattern there - that someone else put their money into something like this and made it back.