I shouldn’t be saying this – high treason, really – but I sometimes wonder if Americans aren’t fooled by our accent into detecting brilliance that may not really be there.
Moving from chair to chair, from coffee machine to coffee machine is the limit of my action in most films. But I enjoy being cast in them because I love watching them.
It was extremely important to show that Wilde’s sexuality was not just some intellectual idea. It was real, and it was about the human body. To just have mentioned it and not shown it would have been, I think, peculiar and wrong.
No, I love the idea that someone changes. As an actor it’s always the thing that you look for. He is someone who starts off bright, cheerful and confident and then has everything taken away from him. It’s a wonderful journey to take.
Now, bipolar disorder, it goes on a spectrum. There’s very severe conditions of it and there are milder ones. I’m lucky enough that it’s reasonably mild in my case.
I have pushed the boat out as far as I should in terms of taking on too many things. I’m getting older and I just could not take it any more. I am now monitoring myself very closely and I’m just trying not to get into that sort of state again.
It is exhausting knowing that most of the time the phone rings, most of the time there’s an email, most of the time there’s a letter, someone wants something of you.
They are just 100 per cent bear, whereas human beings feel we’re not 100 per cent human, that we’re always letting ourselves down. We’re constantly striving towards something, to some fulfilment.
