I really do want to just be able to sit in the corner of the pub with my friends... to just be an actor and still go to the supermarket and not get bothered.

I'm on record saying that HBO is the best television company in the world, and I believe they are. I think they absolutely understand how to make television that is really, really vital and interesting and visceral, and all the things that television really should be.

If you find yourself always playing the villain, or if you find yourself being typecast into a corner where you're not happy then that's probably rather miserable, but if I have been typecast I am quite happy about it.

If you look around us, there are an awful lot of men out there, and women, but mostly men, who believe that they have got a fast-track path to Heaven, if they do the things that they believe God is telling them to do, and I don't just mean Islamic people. I mean Fundamentalist Christians.

Violence is a very ugly thing. Violence is often so casual on film, and made to look so cool and so sexy, but violence is a repulsive, repugnant act that human beings inflict on each other. It shouldn't seem to be cool and sexy, ever really.

Ancient Rome was a violent place.

As an actor you have to get used to receiving gentle little pies in the face.

British actors are pretty good, by and large, at turning on at 'action' and off at 'cut.'

Decide very early on: do you want to be an actor or do you want to be famous? Because they're very different routes.

Dieting isn't complicated: if you eat 2,000 calories, you have to burn it off; simple as that.

Hospitals are very extreme places - you can be in a maternity room one minute, and by someone's bedside as they're dying the next.

I have no problem with television as a genre.

I have to travel a lot for work.

I love all things Apple and have done since 1996.

I really like playing people who are exciting to watch and who burn brightly.

I think the business affairs people at the studios get some kind of perverse satisfaction in finding the worst hotels for actors to stay in.

I think the older I get, the less I should be doing.

I was very unmotivated at school.

I'm not a big fan of patterns. I like the unexpected.

One of the great things about being an actor is that you have a completely different challenge every few months.