When I'm panicked about my love handles, I go to the YMCA and get obsessed with Kid Rock videos as I'm on the running machine.

If there's any plan or scheme on my part, it's subconscious. Whatever I do tends to be very different from the thing I did last. You're terrified of boring either yourself or anyone else. It's always attractive if it feels like something that you haven't done before. I generally tend to be better, I think, when I'm terrified out of my wits.

There were moments where I was being kicked in the stomach, and even though I had this brace on to protect me, I still had to prepare myself for it . You can't be relaxed when that's happening. You have to brace your muscles. I can remember thinking as it was about to happen "Wasn't that how Houdini died?" I think it was.

In my first few years as an actor, I took one terrible TV job after another. But even as I laughed off my awful roles and made fun of myself to friends, my work made me cringe - I dreaded anyone's seeing it. I was crushed that I wasn't doing anything I was proud of.

Every time you start a new job, you're starting from the beginning again and it's terrifying. And you feel like you're going to be fired and told to go home and never to darken the doors of these people ever again.

My take on people and on the characters I play in Transsiberian, the role you're looking for, is that everybody is more than one thing. We're many things, all of us, and there are times when we are capable of great levity and jolliness and then there are times when the opposite is true.

I want any excuse to come home. My dad is not a spring chicken any more. If anyone says, 'Go buy a postage stamp in London,' I'll go and do it.