Some people's personalities are so compelling that they command attention.

I could have gone to the gym for three hours a day and bought into all that, but I just wasn't interested.

It was so soon after I'd had my son and I really wasn't planning on going back to work for a while. I will walk over hot coals to work with Bill Condon on anything, the experience that you have with him is just too good... I've certainly never worked with him before so the trio of Bill [Codon], Ian [McKellen], and Sherlock Holmes, and England: it was too much to say "no" to.

It is always good to explore the stuff you don't agree with, to try and understand a different lifestyle or foreign worldview. I like to be challenged in that way, and always end up learning something I didn't know.

I still know I have an awful lot to learn, and I hope I'm put in whatever situation it is that's gonna help me learn it, or that I'll get to watch really good people do what they do.

I crave a cone of silence every once in while.

For me to have the opportunity to stay with one character for, God willing, a long period of time, is really exciting.