Make love, not war. Unless you’re Loki, in which case: do what you want.
I’d like to fight everybody who wants to make war on people. I’d like to fight bullies, actually. I’d like to stand up to the bullies in this world. I was actually mugged once in London, and I was completely defenseless. They came at me with a… I was held at knifepoint. And I felt so angry that I let them do it and I think I’d like to go back and say ‘Look, it’s okay’, and if they tried to stab me, I could just say ‘You can stop that now’.
I did a production of 'Journey's End,' an RC Sherriff play about World War I, at the Edinburgh Festival. I was 18 and it was the first time that people I knew and loved and respected came up to me after the show and said, 'You know, you could really do this if you wanted to.'
I always found the extraordinary loss of life in the First World War very moving. I remember learning about it as a very young child, as an eight- or nine-year-old, asking my teachers what poppies were for. Every year the teachers would suddenly wear these red paper flowers in their lapels, and I would say 'What does that mean?'
It was quite a European war until 1917, when the Americans joined up. They don't have the same sense of the loss of innocence and the cataclysmic loss of life. A whole generation was wiped out.
The Night Manager doesn't exist in the post-Cold war universe, it exists much more in the modern world, I think. There is more action. The bad guys don't have particularly political or national-political affiliations.
