I often stop when I'm doing something, in the middle of rehearsals or some other job, and I try to take a minute to think "Okay, this might be as good as it gets, so drink it in, appreciate it now". So far, I've been lucky because another job has always come along to equal the last.

It has to be said that the bad guys are often more interesting than the good guys because you get to indulge part of your nature that hopefully gets subsumed most of the time. But I just like playing interesting characters, and variety's the spice of that, as it is with life, I suppose.

I love characters who are clever and smart, and you have to run to catch up with. I think there's something very appealing and rather heroic in that.

We seem to spend a lot of our time in very small spaces spouting a lot of dialogue very quickly.

I think it would be self-indulgent to go, "Oh, I'm going to make this character different by giving him a quirk of some kind." I don't think that serves the story, particularly. But even very similar scenes with a different set of actors, a different set of circumstances, it starts to evolve as a different character.

How galling to watch someone who looks like you, who basically is you, do all the shagging you didn't get to do.

An accent has to do with the way your mouth works and the sounds that come out of your head, but somehow it informs everything about you.