Quotes

It seems to me that most characters, in anything, are flawed in some way, just like most people. You look for the good in the flawed people and vice versa, and then try and make them appealing in some way.

For me, now, working and children is it. There's nothing more to life.

I hate it when people tell you you're good when you know that you're not.

I heat myself up over the fact that I am never going to be as good as I want to be.

Every couple of years - no, that's every couple of weeks - I think I'm going to give up acting.

To start, I wasn't really interested in acting at all, and I didn't make much impact. The first play I was in was on for five nights and I didn't show up for two of them and nobody noticed. But I stayed because that's where my friends were, and after a while I found myself wanting to inhabit other people's worlds and lives.

I do what I can, but I'll always give it a shot. You're not going to see me playing a Welsh character any time soon, not because I wouldn't love to. I went up to Wales once and read for a film with Rhys Ifans, and haven't been asked back since. We did have a nice time on the train on the way back.

I have Googled myself, yeah, I think everybody has. I try not to make a habit of it - in fact I made a rule once never to Google myself, which made me happy.

I have been in control of what I've been doing, of the career I've put together.

I've made a point of trying not to play the same part, and of moving between theatre and film and TV. The idea is that by the time you come back, you have been away for a year and people have forgotten you. If you like having time off, which I do, that's a good career strategy.

I'd quite like to do a musical. I'd probably have to develop that myself.

There was a year between school and getting going as an actor when I basically just watched films. Video shops were the new thing, and there was a good one round the corner and me and my brother just watched everything, from the horror to the European art-house.

'Heroes', 'Desperate Housewives', 'The Sopranos' - they're all very stylised. 'The Wire' is much more rooted in realism and honesty. In American television, I can't think of anything I'd rather have been in because it has got something to say and that is the kind of thing I want to do.

I like the Edinburgh Film Festival, and I've liked what I've experienced of Glasgow's Film Festival too.

It might take me an hour to get to feel at ease with somebody. I don't find it easy to go into a room full of 10 people and give it all away. In the pilot season in Los Angeles I've done that a couple of times.

I can read people, and if the other person doesn't want to say anything, I'm fine with that. People say things when it's time to say them.

I do consider how I spend my time off carefully because I've got two kids.

It's always a good idea to let the audience make up their own minds.

I'm always attracted to bold, risk-taking scripts.

People say 'The Wire's bleak, y'know, but I see it as a love letter to Baltimore, and it's one written in a very strange and complex way.

In drama you can either pretend everything is OK, or you can show the world as it really is in the hope that it gets better.

I myself started out quite young; when you're working, professionally, even if you are in your teens, you just want to be treated the same as everybody else. You just want people to see you as an actor and not as a kid.

I hope it's not all I'll ever do, but I know I've played enigmatic characters. For me, the good characters are people who get places, are devious, are cunning and tricky and hard to pin down. Obviously, if you play one and you do an okay job of it, that'll be on people's minds.

Everything's borne out of human experience, of course - rejection, humiliation, poverty, whatever. People aren't born bad, no matter how harsh the circumstances. There is a person in there, and that person is not made of ice.

I really like coming-of-age dramas. It's probably the most intense period in anyone's life, those years before you become an adult. Dramatically, there's so much to explore there. And it's nice to be around young talent coming through.