When you read the poem, you wonder, what might Grendel have been? Could it have been a person that was turned away? Someone that was disfigured or deformed? Like everything else did, it came from somewhere. It's really exciting, and not knowing is part of the magic and mystery.

You can't go around saying you're the best, all the time, 'cause it puts a target on your back.

I like to know what the gestation of the idea is, I like to know the foundation, and I do a lot of reading and research.

I did quite a lot of fencing when I was a kid, I was a swimmer, and I played a lot of basketball. I was a fencer for Great Britain, but I only did that because I watched Robin Hood, Star Wars, Highlander and The Three Musketeers, and I wanted to emulate Richard Harris and the great British actors that I grew up watching.

A lot of characters now on TV have moved into being anti-heroes, but I wanted to be the hero.

I come from the theater and you normally have four or five weeks to prepare. For me, the fun of the job is to pull yourself into a subject that you know nothing about.

I always love being an actor for the simple fact that, whenever you do a job, you have to read a lot of stuff that you've never read before, you explore things, and generally you meet experts in lots of fields and you get to absorb that information and make it look like you've done it for 20 years.