Within our culture, every school has a swimming pool. We lived on the coast. People swam in the surf. It's a very sporty nation and at that particular time anyone who had an artistic bent was very much an outsider. So if you liked reading or ideas or playing the piano then your dad viewed you as a sissy, basically.

Yeah, well, the F-bomb - it's become as ubiquitous as the word 'like.' People just throw the word 'like' around as punctuation. And I think in a lot of everyday speech, the F-bomb has become a kind of dash or a comma.

There's four biggies. There was Elizabeth I, George III, Victoria, and the current queen, who really dominated four eras.

I wouldn't mind meeting some of the people I've attempted to portray from the olden, olden days. They probably would all have really terrible skin and horrible bad breath, and I'd have to give them an Altoid.

Freedom is the kind of essence of being a pirate: You're away from land-locked Europe. You're not part of the society. You're part of the brotherhood of the sea, Your ship is your sense of identity. So when you approach the wheel, that's what you own.

I like roles that are on the extreme ends of the spectrum, and there's special appeal in exploring these slightly forgotten plays that people might think of as subjects for academic term papers instead of live theater.

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.