If you get too heavy with the nods and winks, people get a sense that they're excluded from something. If they're in screenings and everyone's laughing, and they don't know what the hell it's about, somehow you feel excluded from the party, or like you're not in the inner circle. As a performer, that's the worst thing you can do to an audience. It's fun, but you have to be very careful with it.

Nobody suddenly discovers anything. Thing are made slowly and in pain.

Giving people a hand up, not a handout, is the way forward.

As a boy, I'd always had an interest in theater. But the idea at my school was that drama and music were to round out the man. It wasn't what one did for a living. I got over that.

To make films like 'X-Men' work commercially - and also have some class - is one of the hardest things there is to do. I want to be seen to be able to cross lots of genres and still be 'fair dinkum,' as we say in Australia, which means genuine and true and, well, unique.

If I weren’t getting paid or didn’t have a character like Wolverine to maintain, I would just be a tall, lean, fit guy.

I was brought up in a way that when you're at a dinner party, you don't grab a chip unless it's been offered to everyone else. It's the manners of being brought up by English parents.