The fact is that in England so many of our politicians are career politicians - they've always been politicians since they left their education. And in the old days of course politicians used to be fish mongers or doctors or whatever. They'd lived life. These days, power seems to go to the hands of people that that's all they've done. And I'm not sure that's a good thing, because it does remove them from the realities of life.
I've actually always been fussy about the work I do.
Anywhere I can ski in the morning and sell a movie in the afternoon is good.
I constantly experience failure in that my work is never as good as I want it to be. So I live with failure.
It's always useful to be in big movies for one's career.
You look worldwide for the great leaders, and they're pretty thin on the ground, and of course the problem is unless you're squeaky, squeaky clean, something is going to come out of the cupboard. Most people aren't squeaky clean. Most people have fallen by the wayside once or twice in their lives, and because the world is so transparent now, I think they're very fearful of running for office. It's a huge shame, because often people who have really lived and are amazing people can be brought down by a past indiscretion.
I've always thought of characters like advent calendars. You have Christmas and you have all the little doors over the windows and every day you're allowed to open one more as it gets towards Christmas and you see more and more about what's inside that house.I remember as a kid being fascinated by that and I've always thought of my character as a little bit like that. I like to have secrets and slowly let those secrets out to the audience, sometimes never let them out, but let them see as you open the shutters, open and see a little bit more of a character.
I liked the theater. I liked the people. I liked the time that we worked.
Never played a video game. Actually, I try to keep them out of my house.
I was the youngest. The yule lamb. The one who always got away without doing the washing up. My sister was four years older, and my brother six years.
Mine is an actor's voice, not a singer's voice, but the part was written for an actor (Richard Burton), not a singer.
I was educated in a private school in England amongst people who had been trained for sort of banking or the Army or business. As I came towards the end of my education, I thought I must find something or I'll never meet any of these people again.
Because I'm now successful, what I'm being offered as an actor is more and more of the same.
I succeeded on sort of chutzpah and charm. No technique at all, didn't know what I was doing, but it worked and the character suited me.
I find what I call the [bleep] side of the industry very difficult. You won't see me at other peoples' premiers. I mean, I go to my own premiers because I have to help my film, but I don't enjoy that whole side of it. I don't enjoy celebrityhood. I love getting a seat in a restaurant. I love it when people say hi when I don't know them. I mean, that's fine, but apart from that, I like the elements of celebrityhood which make living in the world like living in your own village.
I envy children who know that they're going to become doctors, know they're going to go into the forces or whatever. I think choice is one of the hardest things, but that's what I try to give my children, to say you can do anything.
I've always believed that the great strength of the Internet is that it allows us to communicate with each other, it allows debate. And I think that gay marriage is a huge step forward. But debate is throwing ideas about, and when it becomes sort of a weapon of character assassination, I think that's crazy. I think the situation in America is different from in England, where we have civil partnership, and now the vote on gay marriage has been carried, and whether it will go through Parliament I don't know.
Could a father not marry his son?
Same-sex marriage will lead to "fathers marrying sons."
I think I'm probably an assassin and not a Templar, but no doubt we're probably run by people with Templar mentalities.
I'm a complete libertarian. I think it's very, very dangerous. I really mean that. I think the smoking ban is a tip of an iceberg of society - the leaders of society telling us how to be. I think it's not their business. It's an attitude where the governors think, 'We know what's best for people, and they're so stupid that they would only not do it if we ban it.'
Americans enjoy uniformity in a way that the British don't; they wanted everybody of a sort of nice chorus line height and here I was, this person who was a good three inches taller than anyone else on the end of the line.
A trip to the mainland was a big event and happened maybe once a year, although now you can get across in a speed boat in seven minutes but then it was a long way away.
At age 10 or 12 he's going to boarding school in the Isle of Wight. The Isle of Wight is, of course, down at the bottom of England just off South Hampton.
I try to avoid doing movies where I act with tennis balls. It's ultimately incredibly tedious.
