“Performing a one-man Macbeth feels like the greatest challenge.”

Often for me, if I hear a song I know, it clicks for me and I hear it in a different way and I think, “I could sing that song. I’ve got something to say about that song. Wanting to connect with an audience and wanting them to rethink songs.

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.

I live in cinema. I feel I’ve lived here forever.

When I started my first film, there were three women directors in France. Their films were OK, but I was different. It’s like when you start to jump and you put the pole very high – you have to jump very high. I thought, I have to use cinema as a language.

Good cinema is good cinema. It makes you feel like you need to work.

What puzzles most of us are the things which have been left in the movies rather than the things which have been taken out.

The future of cinema and communications is all about collaboration and the decentralized control of storytelling.

Cinema, heir of alchemy, last of an erotic science.

Cinema, heir of alchemy, last of an erotic science.

In the Indian film industry, especially those of us who are in mainstream cinema, we invariably play a typical hero’s role.