“When I do a play, it’s like agreeing to be ill for a couple of months.”

Try to be in the day. Try to not have today stolen from you by anxiety about yesterday or tomorrow.”

Anyone who can do the splits and come back up on the backbeat, as James Brown and Prince can, has my eternal respect.

As you get older you feel you need to pay more attention to what is around you and relish it. I’m greedy for beauty.

I used to joke that one of the reasons there was a lack of classical work on my CV was because I couldn’t operate in those kinds of trousers. Which is a joke, but it’s actually also true – if I want to appear in public I want to look my best.

I don’t even own a car.

I did pick up a guitar once, but the strings hurt my fingers so I put it down again.

I love playing half squid/half crab guy because you can get away with a level of acting that if you tried it anywhere else they’d arrest you for crimes against acting.

I wanted to be a journalist, I thought it was glamorous and that I’d meet beautiful women in the rain.

In one way, an attempt to reproduce the way people actually speak, but it’s not just an attempt at naturalism. It’s stylised and it’s heightened, to great effect. It’s elegant and it’s funny and that’s the way to my heart, frankly.

Whatever you do, don’t smoke’. I have had to recover from that and been lucky that I have been able to stop.

You have all these plans to act, and maybe do it rather elegantly, and then they turn the rain machine on.

The way the elderly are treated, and in some cases warehoused and medicated, rather than nurtured and listened to, is distressing.

Hunger is almost like something the West does. It’s almost like the direct result of the way the West performs.

I love imaginative representations of a possible near-future, where you look at the technology and you think, “Well, yeah, that could really nearly be true.” I like those kinds of backgrounds.

Somebody asked me recently, ‘Have you done a lot of plays?’ I thought hang on. .

I think in the old days, everybody used to act really quickly because Hollywood was built by theatre people.

The risk that the economy has entered a substantial downturn appears to have diminished over the past month or so.

I find skydiving really hard. I broke my back while skydiving when I was in the military, and for 18 months all my nightmares were about falling.

We had some guys that abandoned their technique and abandoned some of the things that we just worked a month on.

Name and date split in soft slate a few months obliterate. 166

That the rebels or the terrorists used the chemical weapons in northern Aleppo five months ago [in 2013].

I’m a terrible lip-syncer anyway because I have to be in the moment, and I can’t lip-sync to something I recorded three months before.

Anyone can have bad sets. I saw one guy who I really love – I won’t mention his name – gave a set that was really bad. And then one month later did the exact same set on our show and it was great.

It takes me three months of research and nine months of work to produce a book.