I like challenges. If you're involved, as one is, in filmmaking, you want to challenge yourself. You don't want to repeat what you're done before.

I think you always learn something in every character you play onstage, either personally or creatively.

When you're at drama school you spend so much time working on amazing texts and analyzing them, digging into them, and figuring out why it happens, why you are being asked to say what you're saying, and what the words mean. But then when you start working, most of the stuff would just fall apart if you subject it to that kind of scrutiny.

People are fascinated by evil because its mysterious and it doesnt seem to have a rationale behind it, and the second you say that Hannibal Lector was abducted as a child and he had to eat his sister or something like that, it becomes immediately mundane. The character becomes mundane.

In the old patrician world there was a custom once a week you had to eat a meal with your slaves and get to know them as people.

My father was a Catholic, but my mother wasn't. She had to do that weird deal you do as a Catholic - they deign to sanction your marriage and you have to bring your children up as Catholics.

I remember thinking, 'I'll audition just once and if it doesn't work out I'll never think about it ever again.'