Mr. Bean is at his best when he is not using words, but I am equally at home in both verbal and nonverbal expression.

Nope, I don't enjoy work generally. Not because I'm lazy; it's just all so stressful and worrying.

But, actually, so many of the clerics that I've met, particularly the Church of England clerics, are people of such extraordinary smugness and arrogance and conceitedness who are extraordinarily presumptuous about the significance of their position in society.

It's the demand in many ways of modern television drama - it's very low key and naturalistic, and, generally speaking, the characters that I've played have not been low key and naturalistic.

We still have a tradition certainly in English television; it's faded a bit in the last five years, but we still have a tradition where the important thing is the quality and the challenging nature of the programming.

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.

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.