I spent a month in India and where I learnt an important word for me, for everything that had come before and after, and the was the word 'seva' - the work you do without wanting reward, simply for the work itself, for the spiritual, for the practice and the experience it gives you by doing that work. I began to realise it was something I was searching for all my life, that I was doing theatre not for myself but for something for a search, for a seeking for something that is behind that, to find a truth somewhere about us.

The word 'ego' is very important. The ego is an important element of being human, and of being creative. We need that ego in order to give us a confidence of doing what we're doing. Ego pushes us into the creative world in order to create for something more. I think that a great company of actors, they all have egos, very strong egos, but they're all prepared to share together in order to achieve something even better than that.

World is full of followers and leaders, and I think that if one can become both and be both, to follow in order to lead, and to lead in order to follow, then I think you're on the right path.

I think that in fact by taking on the persona of a human being, you begin to realise that it is all ego, and that beneath that ego is something else, and that something else is a tranquil, nonentity, that we are simply drops of the sea, that we belong to each other.

My mother and my father had very, very strong Scots accents. We were Australian, and in those days when I was young, I spoke with a much more of an Australian accent than I have now. However I knew that if I went to England to become an actor, which I was determined to, I knew that I had to get rid of the Australian accent. We were colonials, we were Down Under somewhere, we were those little people Over There. But I was determined to become an Englishman. So I did.

An actor and a [theatre] director are both what I would call interpreters of work. We interpret a work, just as a musician will interpret a composer's work, we interpret the work of a playwright. We are servants of the theatre and I've always believed that. We must serve what has been written, that's what we're there for.

I loved doing school musicals [as a kid], I even started at an early age to write little plays for the school to perform. I was not just keen on that, it was during that time, during the school period then from an early age, that I began to dream about acting.