“We are adjusters. We empathize, we change rhythm and above all we listen to our fellow actors-if they’re good actors.”

You cannot learn a lesson of profound forgiveness unless you understand what it is to be wounded and forgive that which has wounded you.

I’m open to any project, but my joyful projects are those through which I can say something and through which I can speak to the an audience of people in the world, and I can be that vehicle through which something can be said, I find that entirely thrilling and joyful.

The leaping Jaguar on the bonnet, to me, makes it look more like a hunter than something that is getting away. It’s a hunter. Richard III definitely would have had a chauffeur driven Jaguar MK X.

All the great writers root their characters in true human behaviour.

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.

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.

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’m crazy about James Brown. I’m crazy about soul music. And then the blues. Rhythm and blues.

The Righteous Brothers were purely rhythm and blues, black music.

And I like messing around in the engine room of music. Seeing what happens in the rhythm section area.

Filming is so much to do with rhythm, as is music, and if it isn’t there then you know in the end nobody can save it really, they can’t.

I love feeling the rhythm of other people’s lives. It’s like traveling.

I want to sound like an instrument. I want my voice and my words to marry the beat.

Every thing and every human action revolves in rhythm.

You can hear, like, you know, Africans and Jamaicans doing it just kind of as, like, a rhythmic, poetic conversation, you know, to a rhythm.