I totally agree. I hate knowing too much when I'm going to the cinema and watching as a viewer. I don't want to know that the actor has just gone through a divorce. I don't want to know that the person is an alcoholic. It just gets in the way of my pleasure of watching the character on the screen.

I think sometimes it's sort of easier to be playing a role based on a real person because there's quite often a lot more information, you're not making it up, it's there in books, it's there in research form. But really the questions you ask about the character, and why people behave, and where they come, and how they've ended up in the places they've ended up are the same.

It's obvious to say you can't please everybody and there are always going to be people who are going to say, I just don't like you. There's nothing I can do about that. I'm aware, probably much more aware than my harshest critic, of what my own problems are with my acting ability. I'm very, very critical of myself, and I don't ever want to not be.

I tried college for three months but I was desperately unhappy. I just wanted to perform. I was getting straight As but I had no friends and cried every day.

You bring yourself to every role, it doesn't matter who it is, it doesn't matter if it's a mass murderer, you can bring something to it.

You watch him playing Jack Sparrow, and he's loving it, and he's loving being in that world. He's still excited by it. Sometimes, he'll even say, 'Was that OK?' And I'm thinking, 'You're Johnny Depp man, you know that's OK!' But he doesn't. He's still going to [director] Gore [Verbinski] and asking for help. It's a privilege to see the human side of Johnny. It's really exciting.

It's very rare to get a film script that has good dialogue. A lot of the time, you spend on film sets really fighting to find out how to say the words.