I hated Sundays when I was growing up in Streatham, south London. Everything closed down and stopped.

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.

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.

Shakespeare speaks for the human heart but Dickens speaks for the social man and for injustices.

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.

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

I actually wanted to be a writer long before I wanted to be an actor.