Developing characters is a collective process, on one hand; it's an individual process on the other. The truth is rarely pure and never simple, as dear Oscar Wilde would say. A great of it, of course, is, you collect as much information as you can and then you put it into the mulberry of your mind and hope that you come up with a decent wine. Sometimes you do; sometimes you don't.

People say you never retire in this [film] business and I say, well, not until they retire you.

I thought ['Sailcloth'] was a terrific script. Elfar Adalsteins, the director, is bound to be a director we'll hear from, and the whole thing was really enjoyable.

We shot ['Sailcloth'] five days down in Cornwall, and you couldn't have asked for a more beautiful place. It was a couple of tough days at sea, but when I say tough it was still enjoyable.

The British tradition, basically, is to go to the character. And the Hollywood tradition, shall we say, is basically to take the character to the performer.

I think particularly Daniel [Radcliffe], he knows what he's doing. I'm sure he'll finish up a producer. He really realized what it was, knew the size of it. And it was gigantic, the biggest franchise [Harry Potter] in history.

I stopped asking a long time ago, "why would you want me to play that?" I'm an actor. That's what I do.