My one remaining professional ambition is to read the shipping forecast. I live in hope.

I am a coward, basically, but one of the things about acting is that you are always putting yourself through yet another test.

I did start reading quite young but I was always read to by my parents, who are both actors. Bedtime stories from when I was about two/three to when I was about 15. In fact they didn't stop until I eventually kind of kicked them out of my bedroom.

Most good art is left wing. It's a moot point whether there is any good right-wing art.

If you play a part that's been done before, on stage for instance, you feel like you're carrying a torch and staggering under the weight of it for a bit and then passing it on to somebody else.

Stamps from Afghanistan are hilarious. You can tell when the revolutions are because suddenly they stop having pictures of the mullahs and the independence monument and they start having fish on them.

It would've been hard to do something else, to as it were, run away from the circus and become an accountant.