“I was the boy that turned a girlfriend into the most celebrated lesbian on television. I got so much stick for that.”

The more charming person is the person who admits the other person is more charming.

Fame is a weird one. You need to distance yourself from it. People see a value in you that you don’t see yourself.

If you can’t jump on board when the ride’s going past that’s it, it usually goes by, so the hugest compliment they paid me was to come back to me. It motivated me to try to fulfill their faith.

People’s hands fascinate me. It’s tempting to look at a businessman’s left hand and see if there’s an indentation from a missing wedding ring. Or maybe there’s a tan line and the skin is pressed down where’s he’s worked a ring off his finger.

I can’t stop traffic on Fifth Avenue, not unless I walk in front of an oncoming cab.

I feel that TV and film feed off each other well. It’s more in the perception of the viewer than it is of the actor.

I’d love to do a noir. I think Steve McQueen is so cool. But a classic film is a classic film, and perhaps the fantasy of being those characters should be left alone. You’re treading on very thin ice.

I haven’t done period dramas back-to-back, or really anything back-to-back. You get asked to do what you’re most recently famed for, so I’m careful of not repeating myself.

If you have an over-preoccupation with perception and trying to please people’s expectations, then you can go mad.

Being a posh actor in England you cannot escape the class-typing from whatever side you look at it.

The further you get away from yourself, the more challenging it is. Not to be in your comfort zone is great fun.

My first, big, silly role at school was as Arthur Crocker-Harris in Rattigan’s ‘The Browning Version,’ where my job was to make school-masters’ wives weep with recognition.

I have pitfalls. I have emotional responses to things that are really not about me. They’re about other people.

There’s no shame in stealing – any actor who says he doesn’t is lying. You steal from everything.

Scott Derrickson breathes humour into a character with a very strong identity in the ’60s and ’70s, that psychedelia era of Eastern mysticism meeting the West.

I love doing impersonations of people.

Raising five boys is a handful, trust me.

Thomas Jefferson-another gorgeous white boy who would not have been interested in me. This was my problem in a nutshell. To get some play in Charlottesville, you had to be either a Martha Jefferson or a Sally Hemings.

The boy’s got a lot to learn and I’ve got a lot to teach.

I also used to work in the Catskill Mountains as a bus boy, and I performed in talent shows.

I wanted very much to be Miles Davis when I was a boy, but without the practice. It just looked like an endless road.

My son, George, has been a bad, bad boy! Right, George?

As a boy, I believed freedom for America meant freedom for me. There was a time I believed every word spoken.

I’m so scared girls look at my breast implants and think, ‘To get boys, you need big boobs.’ I tell them, ‘Don’t get it done. Those fears go away. You develop other insecurities, but breasts aren’t one of them.’ I want to get them half-size.