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

There are some directors, lesser in confidence or skill, who make the actor feel very uncomfortable because you feel you’re auditioning for them, every day, and that’s a terrible feeling on the set.

Fifteen years before I became a screen actor, I was in the theatre. A lot of my work was comedy, which I loved doing. It’s harder.

I do believe female directors, as well as our female writer, can bring out male vulnerability that some men can’t because they can’t face it.

I don’t want to be like the actor who rehearses everything in the bathroom, then comes to the set and carries on completely uninterrupted while the other actors tiptoe away.

The number of choices you make in the event that you see on stage, those choices are sometimes largely determined by the rehearsal process and the experiments that you go through and the choices that you make in the rehearsal room, not in front of an audience.

I think if I were to go back on stage I might be in great danger of acting.

In order to inhabit a villain, you mustn’t care what the audience think of you. That’s not why you are there. You mustn’t care for a second whether the audience likes you or dislikes you. Your villain has to be way beyond that.

The many many imponderables come together when a film opens and for all sorts of reasons it may or may not succeed.

I would like to make it known, on this program, loud and clear, that I would absolutely embrace with all five of my arms being a Bond villain.

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.

And playing them really sloppy. Keeping it very basic-and using only a few notes-and playing slowly with perfect rhythm is a task in itself.

Rap is rhythm and poetry. Hip-hop is storytelling and poetry as well.

I usually write from the rhythm section…If a drummer got a funky beat on some things – like a half-shuffle or a shuffle or a backbeat that’s even – I can write something.

My ego only needs a good rhythm section.

It imposes rhythms, it orders, it operates, it does not abandon the earth where its destiny must be fulfilled and whose own destiny must be fulfilled by it. Its history will be that of men and not of idle gods.

Either black people end up being the best in sports, or else it’s show business. You know, we all got rhythm.

My music is rhythm and blues and with that said, the blues element of it is a major portion.

I use rock and jazz and blues rhythms because I love that music.