Two years ago, I shot 'Pillars of the Earth' in Budapest - it was a big part, but I had a lot of time to sit around and visit cafes.

In England we have this saying about Marmite: people either love it or hate it. That's like a lot of the movie work I've done. People either find it repulsive or find it really interesting and get engaged in it.

I always think of comedy as being spontaneous, and yet everything about filmmaking is not spontaneous.

I'm trying to buy a house and set some sense of roots because otherwise you're constantly chasing one job after another, and you look back and you've had all these very extraordinary experiences with extraordinary people, but there's not a line of continuity to it.

I always try to describe making movies like summer camp, or some holiday where you spend all day, every day with a new group of people whom you kind of love and then never see again.

Up there on the screen, we can all fly. But down here on earth, we need to be each others wings.

On so many levels, acting in film and TV is so much the sum of its parts, and somewhere in there, there's an alchemical thing that makes something happen or not - that makes something connect or not. Now, of course you want to make work that people see, but the enjoyment I get out of acting is playing characters.