It was the challenge of that that I found daunting, but also engaging and interesting [to play Maigret].

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.

The clear problem of the outlawing of insult is that too many things can be interpreted as such. Criticism, ridicule, sarcasm, merely stating an alternative point of view to the orthodoxy, can be interpreted as insult.

Art is something that nobody laughs at and nobody makes any money out of is the attitude, which I would dispute.

I'm as poor as a church mouse, that's just had an enormous tax bill on the very day his wife ran off with another mouse, taking all the cheese.

Certainly in the second film [Maigret's Dead Man], which is quite a more unpleasant and darker story, it's quite different in tone and feel.

To criticise a person for their race is a manifestly irrational and ridiculous. But to criticise their religion - that is a right. That is a freedom.