What I appreciated was the fact that the script delved into how Australians were - and still are - condescended to by the English.

I would always slip away to the cinema. I always found something absolutely extraordinary about the fact that these actors were always kind of kicking hard at some new dimension they were doing on film.

I often thought I was in the wrong business. I was pretty seriously thinking of tossing it in before I shot Shine. I do not know why. I was pretty restless, I had been through a bad period of stress induced anxiety - panic attacks - and I was not sure of what I wanted to do.

Someone told me that there's a connection to Superman, that in an early edition of the Green Lantern comics, Tomar Re was the envoy to Krypton. That was fascinating to me.

I was never a leading man. I've always been in the outer concentric circles in the company, being a character actor, which is a good place to be. It gives you that diversity.

More people have a fear of speaking than a fear of death. So at a funeral, most people would want to be the person in the coffin rather than the person delivering the eulogy!

I've discovered I prefer to prepare a few notes or actually write the speech so I can really hone it down to hopefully be entertaining, try and get a laugh at least by the second line, and then say what you need to say.