“Although my family - parents and sister - all work in the personnel management business, their real passion is performing, amateur operatic societies and so on.”
“When you look at all the miracles attributed to Jesus, they're all about change.”
“When I was at drama school, I wanted to change the world, and thought I had some great wisdom to impart to people about humanity. Now that I'm older, I know enough to realise that I know nothing at all.”
“My dad is a Jack Nicholson lookalike and a frustrated performer, my mother's into reading and poetry. I suppose the thing I owe them most is my confidence.”
“We see death constantly on film.”
“For a culture that has such a problem with death, we seem to deal with it in a quite bizarre way. We see people shot, killed and blown up, and we find it funny and sexy and all those things. But, the reality of it is that every day people die, and people are really sad and they grieve and they go through a really difficult process with it.”
“'Hamlet' is one of the most dangerous things ever set down on paper. All the big, unknowable questions like what it is to be a human being the difference between sanity and insanity the meaning of life and death what's real and not real. All these subjects can literally drive you mad.”
“Stories have always been the things that entertain me and make me feel happy and sad and move me and give me the experience of being able to live many lives in one lifetime. It's the best thing about being alive.”
“I find increasingly that the more extreme are the things going on in your life, the more cultural reference points fail you. More mythical reference points actually help, and you realise that's what myths are for. It's for human beings to process their experience in extremis.”
“I think being a parent is the most challenging thing you do. That's why we're here. It's at the heart of what it is to be a human being. It's the ultimate experience because it questions everything about who you are. But it's difficult.”
“On the one hand Twitter gives you the opportunity to engage with people, which is great, but on the other there are people who feel they can say whatever they want, put poison out there, really, without fear of any repercussions.”
“While I enjoy spending time in L.A., Britain is my home.”
“I think I'm becoming more relaxed in front of a camera. I suppose I'll always feel slightly more at home on stage. It's more of an actor's medium. You are your own editor, nobody else is choosing what is being seen of you.”
“I'm a big fan of vampire movies generally and that sort of tradition of characters.”
“I'd love to go back to Europe in the '20s and '30s, for the beginning of the Psychoanalytic Movement, and Freud and Jung, and all that was going on with discoveries in quantum physics. The whole nature of reality was changing and being challenged.”
“You know, we're each the hero of our own story and we perceive what's going on around us, and especially in a relationship, from the kind of viewpoint of, 'Well, this is my story, and I'm the hero of that, and I justify what I do around it.'”
“I'm a huge fan of science fiction and fantasy - not so much horror because I get a bit scared.”
“My taste in watching things runs from dramas and low-budget films to high-end fantasy/science fiction.”
“My chief gifts are - naturally good at all sports with a raw talent for pretty much everything, which if nurtured could develop into improper talent.”