It's such a terrifying thing when mobs of people get together and persecute foreigners.

There's so much going on in the world. There's so much information being thrown at us - so many things are being sold to us, and we're being told how we should appear and how to be more successful, blah, blah, blah. How does that manifest itself? In the pressures, the stress, this need to escape.

I think the fact that us as a race still continues to be very tribal and we haven't really moved away from that over hundreds and hundreds of years of experience.

At one point you think, well, it's funny, I could just be a starving actor... So if somebody were to pull the plug right now, there'd be no room for complaint.

It's more interesting isn't it, if I've got a hedonistic dark side?

I came to Los Angeles and did auditions for television. I made a terrible mess of most of them and I was quite intimidated. I felt very embarrassed and went back to London. I got British television jobs intermittently between the ages of 23 and 27, but it was very patchy.

You know, it's amazing. I don't even have a car, would you believe it? I had a motorbike and it got stolen last year. So I've got to buy another one of those, I suppose. I can treat myself to that.