The arts community still has a long lasting cynicism of the importance, or the artistic value, of comedy. Comedy is just farting about for money.

I've read about eight or ten of the original novels, and one of them is where Maigret's in bed for the entire story! His wife is running around and solving the case!

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.

[Maigret Sets a Trap] was always going to be the first film, and it seemed to be quite a nice story. But of course it meant that here I was playing this new character for the first time, in a place where he had been a relative failure, as all these people had been murdered and the pressure was on. Rather than starting optimistically with his pipe in front of the fireplace, he was in quite a difficult place.

[Maigret] is terribly self-contained, not that I would ever wish him to be any more comic, particularly, but in the second film we've made you see he's a little more ironic from time to time. But as I say, that's just work in progress.

The right to ridicule is far more important to society than any right not to be ridiculed because one in my view represents openness - and the other represents oppression.

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