I suppose I have a highly developed capacity for self-delusion, so it's no problem for me to believe that I'm somebody else.

I've got a serious-looking head.

As actors, we're all encouraged to feel that each job is the last job. They plant some little electrode in your head at an early stage and you think, 'Be grateful, be grateful, be grateful.'

I don’t like to rehearse. And I couldn’t understand how you could go through eight weeks of rehearsal, without exhausting every possibility. To the point where, you know, you would just lie gasping on the floor!

I live in a landscape, which every single day of my life is enriching.

Where I come from, it was a heresy to say you wanted to be in movies, leave alone American movies.

One of the great privileges of having grown up in a middle-class literary English household, but having gone to school in the front lines in Southeast London, was that I became half-street-urchin and half-good-boy at home. I knew that dichotomy was possible.