Having spent so much of my life with Shakespeare’s world, passions and ideas in my head and in my mouth, he feels like a friend—someone who just went out of the room to get another bottle of wine.

And from the first moment that I ever walked on stage in front of a darkened auditorium with a couple of hundred people sitting there, I was never afraid, I was never fearful, I didn't suffer from stage fright, because I felt so safe on that stage. I wasn't Patrick Stewart, I wasn't in the environment that frightened me, I was pretending to be someone else, and I liked the other people I pretended to be. So I felt nothing but security for being on stage. And I think that's what drew me to this strange job of playing make-believe.

This is a call to action—not an action that will make things better in six months’ time or a year’s time, but action that might save someone’s life and someone’s future this afternoon, tonight, tomorrow morning.

The knights of the theater represented to me not only the pinnacle of the profession but the esteem in which the profession was held. To find myself, to my astonishment, in that company is the grandest thing that has professionally happened to me.

For seven years I did very little theatre, and I have to make up some time.

But as I grew up as a child, falling in love with the theater and Shakespeare, my heroes were Sir Laurence Olivier and Sir John Gielgud.

The only still center of my life is Macbeth. To go back to doing this bloody, crazed, insane mass-murderer is a huge relief after trying to get my cell phone replaced.