“Shock is shock. Your body goes into shock, regardless of it being real blood or fake blood. The mind sends powerful messages to all the various glands and secretions in the body. It’s impossible trying to act it; it just happens. It’s a very important question: no acting.”

They’re a very strange lot actors, very strange people.

The hierarchy of class in London was rigid. It was like a religion. It still is to a certain extent.

I honestly have no strategy whatsoever. I’m waiting for that script to pop through the letterbox and completely surprise me.

It’s Sir Ben. I’ve not been a Mister for two years.

You don’t go to a town to present the play and have applause at the end of it, but that’s benign conquest. It’s a glorious way of exploring other landscapes and other cultures in a very life-affirming way.

I’m convinced that had I not changed my name, I don’t think I would have had quite the same career curve that I eventually had.

One of the greatest things drama can do, at it’s best, is to redefine the words we use every day such as love, home, family, loyalty and envy. Tragedy need not be a downer.

Equal partners aren’t always what we envision as being manifestly equal. Equality can come in many different shapes and sizes and combinations.

I think that most actors attempt to keep in touch with the child.

My line-learning is very special. I like to learn the dialogue of the whole film before I arrive.

I’ve met quite a number of people in my career, but I do have an extraordinary memory. And even though they may drift into the periphery of my memory, I can bring them right back when I need them.

I’ve never had to turn my hand to anything for monetary gain, other than pretending to be somebody else. I’m deeply fortunate.

But filming is good for you, because the crew isn’t allowed to laugh. You can’t get addicted to getting the laugh.

But comedy I’d love to do as much as humanly possible.

I have a rather naive approach, I think, to my job.

If you are a libertine, if you’re not given to long-term faithful relationships, you tend to project your behavior onto everyone else. It’s like the person who knows they’re not trustworthy; they tend to mistrust everyone else.

The Kessler Theater is one such gem, an Art Deco beauty … for a slice of real life, there’s always the Kessler.

real beauty is so deep you have to move into darkness to understand it.

One thing that fiction does is it allows us to take big picture questions, big issues, big moral and socio-political changes and see how they play out on real people’s lives, with real individuals.

I have felt terribly from the beginning when I saw the problems and recognized that they would be ongoing. We were hired to put back the contours of the greens as closely as possible to George Thomas’s designs and were real proud of what we did. It’s a sad situation now.

When you realize the writers start writing to who you are, you’re basically reading reviews of yourself. And then it becomes this cyclical nightmare where I feel like I need to play into it, then I find myself acting like the character in real life.

But the truth is that L.A. was never entirely real anyway, as Steely Dan, Randy Newman, Warren Zevon, Larry David and Alan Ball all understood.

The longer we listen to one another – with real attention – the more commonality we will find in all our lives. That is, if we are careful to exchange with one another life stories and not simply opinions.

Bands who are in their early 20s today, they are living in their own time and they have a series of parameters they have to work around.