I made the film in spite of Harvey, not because of Harvey.

It’s a source of great sadness to me that my father died without having seen me do anything worthwhile. He was constantly having to make excuses for me.

I come from not just a household but a country where the finesse of language, well-balanced sentence, structure, syntax, these things are driven into us, and my parents, bless them, are great custodians of the...

As a member of the audience I don’t like it that I can’t see what’s going on in the eyes and in the face and in the most subtle responses of a performer when I’m...

There are always practical decisions to be made about any character you’re playing.

I have a strange relationship with time. I’m not aware of it passing.

It didn’t occur to me that it was possible to breathe life into Abraham Lincoln.

I broke things to get attention.

There must’ve been some part of me that wanted to make my mark. But there was never a defining moment.

I’m not really a storyteller myself – I tend to get all tangled up when I try and tell stories.

I suppose the place where I live is fairly remote, it would seem remote to some people.

A voice is such a deep, personal reflection of character.

When I do work, I feel the same sort of urgency as I ever did. If I didn’t feel that, I don’t think I would wish to be doing it. I wouldn’t really see the...

I avoid talking about the way I work. But in avoiding it I seem only to have encouraged people to focus their fantasies about me in an ever more fantastical way.

When I’ve gone back to work, it’s always with that sense of inevitability. That may be a complete delusion, but it’s the one that I need to get out of bed and go about my...

For as long as I can remember, the thing that gave me a sense of wonderment and renewal… has always been the work of other actors.

The whole thing of weight, I guess it’s because there is a wider fascination we all have with weight.

I never retreat from films, as it were, I simply indulge in other interests, that’s all.

To people who don’t know me I’m defined by a number of things that people know about me that are entirely untrue.

I’m woefully one-track-minded.

I think some actors thrive on working at a much greater pace than I do.

Perhaps I’m particularly serious, because I’m not unaware of the potential absurdity of what I’m doing.

As actors, we’re all encouraged to feel that each job is the last job. They plant some little electrode in your head at an early stage and you think, ‘Be grateful, be grateful, be grateful.’

I can’t honestly account for the very personal response that I have to one story and not another, a sense of an orbit, the orbit of a world that draws me as my own life...

I’m not picky, quite honestly.

A lot of guys in jail tattoo their hands.

I can’t re-examine work I did in the past with pride.

One of the great privileges of having grown up in a middle-class literary English household, but having gone to school in the front lines in Southeast London, was that I became half-street-urchin and half-good-boy at...

If people take an interest in you and they think there’s half a chance, they might hang on. It’s dreadful.

I’m not keen on history being tampered with… to any extent.

At some point in your life, if you’re lucky, you get to design the way in which things evolve.

In all fields of creativity you see the result of work that has become habit. Where the creative impulse has become flaccid or has died out altogether, and yet because it is our work and...

I see a lot of movies. I love films as a spectator, and that’s never obscured by the part of me that does the work myself. I just love going to the movies.

How can you be a recluse in a house full of children, even if you had the inclination to be, which I don’t?

I became conflicted in my late teens.

I don’t feel my son should pay the price for what I do.

The one thing that I appear to have been given, bearing in mind that I am capable of being very, very scatty and extremely lazy, is the ability to concentrate on something I choose to...

My curiosity sustains me for the period of the shoot.

I’m very often still very much alive for that other being and that other world long after the film is finished.

If you remain unsettled by a piece of writing, it means you are not watching the story from the outside; you’ve already taken a step towards it.

I think I have a strange relationship with time. I’m not really aware of that time passing. I don’t feel that I’m wasteful with time. But I’m not aware of it passing.

Quite honestly, if I were doing work related to a living being or historical being where there was visual or audio recordings available, I would find that extremely difficult because I don’t know how you...

I have always been intrigued by these lives I have never experienced.

I don’t deal at all well with the relative amount of stuff I have to face already.

I don’t torture myself.

I love to sit and watch people. I love to sit and listen to people.

My preference is that, that day when someone sticks a tripod in front of you with a camera on the top, it is not day one.

I’ve been very lucky.

I didn’t like the idea of being foolish, but I learned pretty soon that it was essential to fail and be foolish.

Being at the centre of a film is a burden one takes on with innocence the first time. Thereafter, you take it on with trepidation.