I want to express myself in a different way. I have a performing inclination.

It certainly helps, I think, with some actors to understand the process of acting. You see what extraordinary pressure they're under, there's a huge circus dedicated to a particular moment and they're got to deliver and it can help that you, even if empathetically alone, understand what they're doing.

[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.

No, no, I was only funny on stage, really. I think I was funny as a person toward my classmates when I was very young. You know, when I was a child, up to about the age of 12.

Johnny English is someone who really means well it's just that he's not as good as he thinks he is, and I think that maybe that's the British male in a nutshell.

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 haven't made any particular decision [on Maigret], I haven't been asked if I want to carry on with it. All these things are a matter of whether you feel as though the idea is developing and whether it's still interesting to play.