Acting is no longer about lying. It's now about revealing the truth. People are at ease with me now. Honesty is the best policy.

There are directors, and I think this is true of all directors, it would be true if I was a director - If the actor didn't want to do what I was suggesting, I would let him do it his way, and then I would say to him, "Just give me one where you do what the director wants", and that, of course, is the take that's used.

I've played an awful lot of people that other people would call villains, but that isn't a very helpful attitude to have if you're about to play them. They are just people, and they may do dreadful things and say dreadful things, but your job as an actor is to know why they do them or say them.

When we'd suggested doing it, the Theatre Royal management had said, 'Nobody wants to see Waiting for Godot.' As it happened, every single ticket was booked for every single performance, and this confirmation that our judgment was right was sweet. Audiences came to us from all over the world. It was amazing.

I often thought my gravestone would say, 'Here lies Gandalf. He came out,'

I suspect the base that I'm working from is not particularly one of inquiry, but of memory of what I did last time.

That's the imagination that happens in the theater. That imagination is translated in film by the film magicians and all the technology.