“Sometimes it’s right to do the wrong things and right now is one of those times.”

When I choose a role it’s either because I recognise the man, or that I’m very curious to know him. If I neither recognise nor know him, then it is better that I don’t play him.

I always try to find something I admire about every character I play.

I think Romeo and Juliet is uplifting. That’s how much a son wishes to avenge his father. That is how much two young people can love each other.

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.

Making music can sometimes make me a bit restless, so it’s fun when I get to be expressive in another way.

Sometimes my dad even gets on this kick–‘You hate this country’….I have to tell him…I just hate being lied to.

I wondered what that was like, to hold someone’s hand. I bet you could sometimes find all of the mysteries of the universe in someone’s hand.

Sometimes our behavior with each other is no different from the cry of an unattended baby.

I am tough, and sometimes I tell it like it is. Tough love can work wonders.

It is hard to keep a straight face during comedy scenes. It’s considered really bad form to laugh at someone else because you can ruin their best take. But sometimes it’s very hard not to.

I think I come under the singer/songwriter badge. I’ve always written songs right from the very beginning. Because of my style of playing people tend of me more of a guitar player than a singer sometimes.

Sometimes I think that I understand my movies after I make them. Really. I go very often off of instinct.