The element of time-travel is handled far more intelligent in Harry Potter.

Yeah, well that’s the best thing about it, I think, is knowing kids and kids getting mental when they know you’re in it. Any kid you meet and anyone I know tells the kid you’re...

I want that. I want that awful intense and serious unhappiness, cos then I might feel better, and then I might be happy.

I felt an enormous responsibility because internationally there’s a real passion among kiddies for these books.

I met the Coens here a few years ago and they said they liked my work.

He’d been let down so oftenHis brow was on the floorBut then they foundA small hole in the groundAnd let him down some more

Well, The Island of Dr Moreau wasn’t very good, was it? I remember the day Brando turned round to me and said this was the craziest thing he’d ever been involved in.

I feel like I’m in a film about a struggling artist who keeps getting up at all hours of the night to look at his big, blank empty canvas. And in a way I am....

Not really, although I kind of went into a few chat rooms to research the character and a lot of the kids were very abrasive about me playing the character, because they didn’t know me,...

Yeah he’s a kind of very kindly, very nurturing teacher with a little dark secret that I am supposed not to mention, but its one of the best selling books in the world, so I...

I was still listening to the Beatles until I came here, you know.

Restoration I did because I really loved e novel and I like Michael Hoffman, who directed it, but it wasn’t a really challenging part for me. I’m not critical of the film: I just don’t...

It is. I mean people probably know it better than me if you have read the books. I mean, I had not read the third book, by the time I came to do it.

The very best thing about doing it is seeing the reaction on kid’s faces when you tell them you’ve done it.

And it was only released in London last week, so when I go back to England Monday or whatever, I am expecting heaps of adulation. I’m hoping there is. If that doesn’t happen I will...

I don’t think Alfonso was a big expert on Potter either. He was feeling his way through it more than I was.

I had such a nice time making it, and I can’t wait to make the fifth one. The whole crew were just really, really lovely. All the costume people, the make-up girls, the kids –...

Well I am afraid that I am going to die, because I have just put a down payment on a house.

It wasn’t the greatest script in the world, but not many people can say they’ve played a wicked king in a swashbuckling Arthurian special-effects monster movie.

I’m in the fifth one, so I’m reading the book now. You know he’s not a werewolf don’t you? He’s actually a cat!

You can say at least once in your career you’ve done the whole werewolf transformation thing. But it wasn’t fun to do.

I’d only read a bit of the first book. And I just knew about all the media furor over it. But I’d not read books 2 or 3. I’d just read a bit of it....

It was actually the thing that I’ve put my heart into the most, in terms of research and everything, because I was a great admirer of Rimbaud’s work.