Ultimately, we are all products of the experiences we have and the decisions we make as children, and it remains a peculiar detail of human condition that something as precious as the future is entrusted to us when we possess so little foresight. Perhaps that's what makes hindsight so intriguing. When you're young the future is a blank canvas, but looking back you are always able to see the big picture.

Chris Martin's a good friend of mine. I'm actually Apple's godfather. He's an old friend and we've been mates for quite a few years now.

When you meet people that you know from other films - as often happens to me, and as tends to happens to you when you're an actor, you constantly meet people that you've seen in other films. But when it's people who've kind of had a seismic effect on your life, it's quite extraordinary.

I think we all mistake certain things for happiness. I think we mistake comfort for happiness and we mistake pleasure for happiness, and entertainment for happiness, when really these are just things we use as proxies for our happiness. We use them to cheer us up or try and achieve brief happiness, when really happiness is something much more profound and long lasting and exists within us.

American audiences tend to be more expressive than British ones.

Unfortunately the necessity to promote a film sometimes works against it, in that you are forced to reveal information [about it] that in an ideal world you would hold back.

Rory is very established in England, which you are seeing right now with Bond. But his father Roy Kinnear was a very, very beloved comedy actor here in the UK. And Rory actually even looks a bit like his dad. And so it makes a lot of sense to me that Rory has such good comic chops because it's in his blood. He's very, very funny as Sean.