I went to Queen's University Belfast and stayed nine months, then I ran away to be an actor.

To live another person's life is quite a weird thing.

My mother wanted me to be a teacher. She had this vision of me walking across the quadrangle in an Oxford college wearing my academic gown.

Increasingly I've come to think that what's at the core of acting is thinking. Most people would say it's feeling.

I love storytelling and I love just relating directly to an audience. That's why we do theatre, it's because we love contact with the audience. We love the fact that the audience will change us. The way the audience responds makes us change our performance.

Artists probably should have some impenetrable aspects of themselves.

To enter a theatre for a performance is to be inducted into a magical space, to be ushered into the sacred arena of the imagination.