Quotes

I remember my eldest daughter pulling herself up on the sofa and using it as a balance point. I was calling to her across the living room. She looked at me and wanted to come to me and she looked at the floor and was scared she might not make it, but then she toddled quickly across and fell into my arms. It was amazing. The look on her face!

What marks me getting home is when I've completely unpacked.

My ideas for the future have become about opportunity and hard work, rather than having doors slammed in my face, which is what I worried about when I was younger!

The arts safeguard our culture.

The plays that survive the most easily are the ones in which Shakespeare has dug deep into the psychology of people in extreme situations.

Shakespeare put characters in extreme circumstances, all over his plays. Therefore their behaviour becomes extreme, in ways that can be both extremely good and extremely bad.

What we think about certain characters and plays changes depending on our current awareness.

In 2007 I took a two-year break from shooting the BBC series 'Hustle,' in which I played a big-time con artist. I'd been making the series for four years and I was afraid of being typecast. For a change I got involved in a series called 'Bonekickers,' about a team of archaeologists.

I normally play characters who are dealing with an overall objective - a great 'want' in their life.

People are having to come to terms with the question: how important is it, really, that Obama is black? Yes, skin colour is a factor, but it's about so more than that.

There was more fuss made about Colin Powell being made general in America than there is about Othello being a general in the play.

When you take on a character you try and lose yourself into it because you want to be less self-conscious.

I know some actors don't want to see faces out there; they prefer to perform to a black wall. But I like knowing I'm talking to people.

When I stand back and look at people I was at drama school with, and think of how good they were, yes, I do have to pinch myself. I know I've been lucky. But when I get an audition, I haven't got the job, I've only got the opportunity - and when I've got the job, there's a lot of hard work and bloody mindedness yet to come.

If you stop to think how nice everything is even for a moment, you're already going backwards again. You have to keep walking. I'm constantly worrying about what I'm going to do next.

I'll always be awake at three in the morning, going over my lines.

Life's stories are important to tell because they remind us just how much strength ordinary people have when facing everyday, huge problems.

It's always good to go back and remind ourselves just how earth shattering it is just to have a baby, or to lose a loved one. And every now and again, we need scripts that remind us just how powerful those moments are.

Sometimes, as an actor, you'll get to do work that's purely entertainment, and that's great.

A lot of writers will take a character at the beginning of a story. And that character will stay the same all the way through, but what happens to them becomes the interesting factor.

The great stories are always the old ones - they never change.

It's interesting, now we have these huge TVs with wonderful sound and so on at home, we're awash with wonderful dramas from so many different sources that you can sit and enjoy with family or friends, and explore characters over two years via really sharp writing.

Playwrights are discovering you can bypass the shorthand of cinema and really explore a situation, ramp up the pressure, over several hours of telly.

This continual one upmanship between countries, it is much more complex than can ever be laid out in a newspaper, but it's been interesting and eye opening to go into that world and play it for television.

The Undeclared War' is one of those series that points at something that should concern us all.