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.

I don't think you should be too absolutist about what you play and what you don't play.

My personal problem is that I take the business of film-making so seriously that I find it very difficult to relax.

When you play a serious role, as far as I'm concerned, I feel I'm using exactly the same skills, whatever they are, to play the role as you do with something more obviously comic. It's slightly different muscles, but the same skill set.

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 a bit disconcerting being treated like Madonna.

[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.