I constantly experience failure in that my work is never as good as I want it to be. So I live with failure.

A trip to the mainland was a big event and happened maybe once a year, although now you can get across in a speed boat in seven minutes but then it was a long way away.

You have to communicate on a much greater scale. With a camera, you can use the flick of an eye. On stage, a lot of other things are happening that can pull focus or energy. You're always thinking the same way, but you have to amplify your thoughts with the volume of your speech and the ways you use your whole body to communicate what you're feeling. It's a little bit different from film.

Sadly, one's parameters are constantly narrowed by one's success.

I think I would not be described as a character actor in that I don't take on characteristics which are very alien to me.

I think nobody since has written such extraordinary work as Shakespeare writes. The characters he writes are full of inconsistencies, which is a great human quality - I mean we're all very inconsistent in the way we behave.

I've always thought of characters like advent calendars. You have Christmas and you have all the little doors over the windows and every day you're allowed to open one more as it gets towards Christmas and you see more and more about what's inside that house.I remember as a kid being fascinated by that and I've always thought of my character as a little bit like that. I like to have secrets and slowly let those secrets out to the audience, sometimes never let them out, but let them see as you open the shutters, open and see a little bit more of a character.