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

Everything that we have gone through, are going through, and will go through is there in Shakespeare. It is all of human life.

Many actors have protested about mobile phones going off in theatres, but the real menace now is people texting during a show. It may only disturb a few people around them, but for me, as an actor, when I spot them answering their emails, I am outraged.

When the BBC decided to bring Doctor Who back as a feature film a few years ago, one national newspaper ran a poll to ask its readers who should be the new Doctor, and I topped it.

Like many Catholics, I was very affected by the personality of Jesus and that impression, pious as it was, has stayed with me.

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.