“I wouldn’t do my roles if I really hated it. I’ve done things I hated, but I didn’t go into them thinking I would hate them. I want to have fun. I don’t want to go to work and not enjoy it.”

You do get really exhausted doing films. You work such long hours, and after a while, things can get out of perspective, just like if anyone’s tired, things get on top of them.

I was horrified when Richard Chamberlain and Rupert Everett said gay actors should stay in the closet. They were saying to people that they should live a lie and not be liberated, to live in fear of being found out.

With all this stuff going on, with the “Don’t ask, don’t tell” and things like that, we are second-class citizens, definitely.

I always think about a little gay boy in Wisconsin or a little lesbian in Arkansas seeing someone like me, and if I cannot be open in my life, how on earth can they?

With Urban Secrets, I just really liked the idea of wandering around chatting to people.

Romeo is the most misunderstood character in literature, I think. He’s hardcore to play because he’s displaying the characteristics of Hamlet at the beginning, and, well, then everything else happens.

Be who you like as long as you mean it.

I actually find in America, there’s a slight snobbery about actors who go back and forth between big heavy dramas and popcorn fare. That always intrigues me, because that doesn’t exist in the same way in Britain. And I imagine it would be worse.

I like working on things that are very different and that involve different disguises.

If you are a cabaret artist and you are mostly singing other people’s songs, you’re asking them to rethink a song, listen to it in a different way. The most impact you can have while asking them to re-listen to a song is if it’s a song they know very well.

You can feel it coming and you can see where it is going to take you but you are powerless, utterly powerless to stop it. I know now.

I think American actors are much more intimidated by Shakespeare.

Actors aren’t stupid, mostly, and if there’s a sensibility and an aesthetic that a director’s going for, if you’re aware of that too, you can do things to help that.

If the president of the country is not actually saying something, allowing equality to happen, how could you expect to counsel kids not to bully other kids?

You should *have* an experience; it shouldn’t just *be* an experience.

Most people will never know anything beyond what they see with their own two eyes.

If there is no passion in your life, then have you really lived? Find your passion, whatever it may be. Become it, and let it become you and you will find great things happen FOR you, TO you and BECAUSE of you.

Really top-notch directors, I’ve often worked with them just to see how they work.

In love, we have to dare everything if we really love.

Do you know, why I really love my helmet that much? Because it makes me 15 centimetres taller!

It helps that, if I don’t want to play, I don’t really have to! I’m not the best drummer in the world, but it’s something I love and enjoy, and that sounds like a good trade.

When you look at the Moon, you think, ‘I’m really small. What are my problems?’ It sets things into perspective. We should all look at the Moon a bit more often.

I do believe, and I will always believe, that Shakespeare on film is really something that should be tried more often because it is an opportunity to take the humanity that Shakespeare writes into characters and express it.

Sweetness is the opposite of machismo, which is everywhere-and I really don’t get on with machismo. I’m interested in sensitivity, and weakness, and fear, and anxiety, because I think that, at the end of the day, behind our masks, that’s what we are.