Acting is probably the greatest therapy in the world. You can get a lot stuff out of you on the set so you don't have to take it home with you at night. It's the stuff between the lines, the empty space between those lines which is interesting.

In the late '70s, maybe just before I started, there was still an attitude that if you did film you didn't do TV and vice versa, but that's gone now.

My dad was rubbish at all other aspects of his financial life, but he's pretty good at paying the rent.

There's a kind of unwritten rule: Don't say anything at all, and everything will be fine. It's a producer's medium. The directors aren't there to make any decisions. They're not going to change anything.

I've never been good at accepting jobs six months down the line. I can't do it. If I'm thinking about this, I can't think about that. So I always seem to fly by the seat of my pants.

A lot of the characters I play have problems, they are marginalised, they have serious psychological problems, problems with relationships, with childhood. These are big subjects, big subjects. You can't balk at work like that. As an actor, that's as good as it gets.

It's much more fun to be ugly.