It's nice when you've done enough movies that you can do your own anthology.

Having grown up in the theater family, having done a huge amount of acting from a very little boy to precocious teenager in Shakespeare festivals that my father produced, I went off to college and fell in with the theater gang. I was already an experienced actor. I became a kind of campus star. I heard all this applause and laughter.

The most exciting acting tends to happen in roles you never thought you could play.

If my life was a play, age 35 was my intermission.

It's very interesting, I had an extremely intense experience with my dad in 2002, when he was an old man and very ill and I was taking care of him and my mother, and he was extremely depressed, virtually lost the will to live, and I realized my main job was cheering him up to save his life.

I always tell that to young people - go to college, do theater, work with an audience. Don't try to learn how to act in front of millions and millions of people. Don't make that your first ambition, to be on a sitcom or get into the movies. Learn who you are as an actor, and the best way to do that is to do it in front of an audience.

Any character you play, you're on his side. You do have the third eye that looks at what an appalling creature he is, but you have to look at what's good about him.