How many chances to you get to make a musical about a serial killer? The minute Tim Burton approached me, I was in.

I do believe that you have to bring some degree of truth from yourself to the role [Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street ]in and I'll admit it here, I have shaved a grown man before. I have done it. And it wasn't Tim [Burton].

Any character that you come up with or create is a piece of you. You're putting yourself into that character, but there's the guise of the character. So there's a certain amount of safety in the character, where you feel more safe being the character than you do being just you

I always felt like I was meant to have been born in another era, another time.

I'd just thank the people out there who have been with my up-and-down, weird-road, strange career and supported me and stuck with me all these years. I mean, they're my boss. That's what keeps me working.

I can't stand not being able to joke around on set, so I have to.

Barrie and the wonderful characters he created, Lewis Carroll, even French literature, like Baudelaire or over in the States, Poe, you open those books, you open The Flowers of Evil and begin to read. If it were written today, you'd be absolutely stupefied by the work. It's this incredible period where the work is timeless, ageless. So yeah, I just love all those guys. It's my deep passion in those great 19th century writers.