I'm not looking for anything other than an interesting role to play.

I think you're bound to get a sense of any character that you play. It's not something you often do in comedy.

For telling a good and incisive religious joke, you should be praised. For telling a bad one, you should be ridiculed and reviled. The idea that you could be prosecuted for the telling of either is quite fantastic.

I mean I can do it when I'm very relaxed, and with good friends, then I think I can be amusing.

I like to relish words and sentences, and phraseology, and there's not much facility for that [playing Maigret].

This is sort of inflection-free acting [playing Maigret], and I really wasn't sure if I could do it - you make your mind up on whether I've succeeded or not. But yes, I found it difficult when we were shooting; it was a couple of weeks before I settled into not worrying - to finding a way of delivering those lines - so my worries of many months before I think had been justified. I found it a difficult way of being.

The Maigret stories are all very different in terms of the content and the way that the stories are told. They're not what I would call formulaic.