Apart from earning an awful lot of money, why would you go to Hollywood?

I don't feel like a romantic lead; I guess I feel more like a character actor.

I think people ought to do what they feel useful at the time. If I do things because I ought to do them, I switch off.

Some British actors are snobby about telly, and I don't understand that.

What's exciting is there's a curtain that divides the audience from this other world. You want to see behind.

Nobody's really unsympathetic, I think. People do good and bad things. If a character's totally unsympathetic, they're not real and I'm not interested. Even the real monsters have to have a spark of something you can relate to.

I did four or five years in telly, and by the end of it was drained. I was a bit sick of myself. I didn't feel like an actor anymore. That sounds silly, but when you're doing a play you're using different muscles, and it blew all the cobwebs away.