We are not telling Tudor history; we are creating ' Wolf Hall ' from novels, which are already a rereading of Tudor history.
For me the rehearsal period is the part I most enjoy. It's the creating of the story.
I always resented Tom [Hardy] for turning up on Band Of Brothers and getting the girl — in fact, the only girl in a cast of hundreds of smelly men! I, on the other hand, spent eight months with my face squashed up against someone else’s backside in one sodden trench after another. And it looks as if Tom might have got the girl again [in Colditz], damn his eyes.
I've always had a 'Work hard, play hard' attitude to life - I still do - but sometimes you get involved in something that needs a calm, methodical approach.
Temperamentally I'm not a natural producer, because I don't have the patience.
People need revelation, and then they need resolution.
I think people like to be scared. I think people like tension and suspense in a movie.
You never know when you're taking a job, ever... but you try to take good scripts. That's all you can do as an actor - take the best thing available. Even then, it's not [really] in your control. Certainly not in film and TV, because there are so many other elements. You just have to take control of your own performance.
You just have to take control of your own performance.
I don't believe Jesus was the son of God, although I'm inclined to think he might have been a great prophet.
My heroes were all in the theatre.
Of course the lower classes have always felt downtrodden and aspired to a better life. But there is this theory that people respond to a class structure in England - there was a time when people knew who they were and knew whom they served and as long as management wasn't abusive, it was a good life for people.
You know, I think I am faintly spiritual.
A cricket ball broke my nose when I was a kid so I couldn't breath through it. Before I had it operated on I used to stand on stage with my mouth slightly open.
I want to make a clear distinction between people who take acting seriously and people who call themselves actors because theyve been on reality TV or something.
It's an unfair comparison because when things are developed in the UK, they're developed at script stage only.
No Western government has ever played the long-term in terms of foreign policy.
You know what it's like to feel anxious - it's horrible feeling anxious. It's stressful having that feeling, having butterflies in your stomach, even for a day, and you don't sleep at night.
I love going for a swim. Growing up in England, anywhere with a pool seems like the height of glamour to me.
I was, if you like, a successful schoolboy in that I had a degree of talent in all the required things that make you a success at school.
Acting can be a narrow and isolated experience, because you only examine your particular part.
You can't do something that is morally vacuous or dysfunctional and then write it off saying, 'It wasn't my film, I was just doing a job in it.'
I've had loss in my life, and I like to think my mother's energy lives on in some faintly Buddhist way. I do find some comfort there.
It's certainly true that I was brought up in that British amateur tradition, the one which always held that if you were reasonably good at cricket, knew one or two Latin texts and a few zingy Oscar Wilde quotes for dinner parties, you were pretty much ready to go and run some outpost in Hindustan.
In England we burnt redheads at the stake, because we thought they were witches. There are still young redheads in Britain getting ripped for having red hair. 'Oy, Ginger!'
