Quotes

There was a kind of physical anarchy that dominated most of my younger life. I was always too skinny, not hairy enough, my voice jumped around. It was a thing that drove me away from towel lines in gym class.

I hate the idea of sheltering kids from challenging books. It's just another form of conservative fear that promotes ignorance more than anything else.

I saw 'Six Degrees of Separation' because my brother was in it. It was a watershed experience. It was theatrical and scary, and New York functioned like a character. John Guare became a hero for me.

The biggest audience for Off Broadway is mostly coming in on a train - either Upper East Siders or Metro-North. I go to the theater, and everyone around me is over 50. How interested will they be in my kind of work?

I would hope that the staffs at juvenile detention centers and reform schools are carefully chosen so that there is a community of support and hope.

I like to write about teenagers because it's such an uncertain and dramatic time.

When you're poor, you don't want anyone to know you're poor.

Film directing has perfected my theater directing. I think when I first started directing, a lot of my stuff was very lateral; I was afraid to have the actors' backs turned away, afraid to put them too far upstage, and I think once I did more things with film, I got more interested in composition.

When I work in the theater, you know you'll get this almost devotional, religious experience where you're breaking bread with everyone every day.

When you're making under-million-dollar films, it becomes so much about actors' availability. When you're using big actors for small films, you're in second or third position to the big monoliths.

'Homeland' is a thriller with a lot of cloak and dagger spy stuff, which is one of the things that makes it so much fun.

My mother is American. I first went to school in America, and we came back when I was about six to rural Norfolk. In primary school, I was teased immediately and mercilessly. I probably dropped that accent within about 10 days.

We rarely just hate people or love people. Normally, the people we have moments of the most impassioned hate for, it's because we love them so much.

We shot a bit of 'Hunted' in Tangier, and you are in a very, very different world. It's very difficult to blend in over there.

So my character on 'Tyrant' is a chap called Barry Al Fayeed, and he is the second son of a fictional Middle Eastern dictator. But, he has grown up since he was young in America. He's trained as a doctor. He's married a beautiful American girl, had two kids, so he's very much an American.

I'm actually half Brit and half American. I have a British father and an American mother, but as far as I'm aware, no Middle Eastern blood.

Obviously, 'Homeland' is not just a spy thriller. It's more than that, but 'Tyrant' will be a bit more of a palace drama. It'll be about the families, but there will be political intrigue as well.

I've done shows that aired on American TV, but none of them proved to be successful, so yes, no one here knows who I am.

To be honest, unless you rocket straight to stardom as a gorgeous young vampire, you can spend a lot of time working behind a bar.

I had some great high points and thought: 'This is fantastic. I'm going to be a huge star.' Then something happens, and you can't get a job to save your life.

Everyone working on 'Tyrant' wants to present the world and the issues in it in an intelligent, open, fair, non-reductive kind of way. For the actors, we have to try and make these stories as truthful and compelling as possible.

Who knows - I would like to think that I'd be a fantastic president, and I'd be extremely levelheaded, and I'd be very fair, and I wouldn't persecute people, and I'd listen to the people that disagreed with me and all the rest of it, but who knows.

I was always interested in it when I was younger, but it was when I was at university, getting together with other like-minded theatrically inclined types, that I admitted to myself that I wanted to be an actor.

That's the great thing about university: you've got people around you who are taking a risk and trying things out themselves. It gives you the confidence to try and take it to the next step, which was drama school.

I certainly have a sliver of me, which is definitely American, and feels a great pull towards where I spent time when I was very young, which is in California.