I get sent a lot of scripts which feature him as a kind of all-purpose Victorian literary character and really understand little, if anything, about him, his life or his books.

I love storytelling and I love just relating directly to an audience. That's why we do theatre, it's because we love contact with the audience. We love the fact that the audience will change us. The way the audience responds makes us change our performance.

I would say critically of myself that I am somebody without secrets. Sometimes acting depends on you having a secret. I don't think I've ever had that.

Jesus is absolutely at the centre of Western civilisation and part of my fascination with him is, why? What is it about this particular man and his story?

Many actors have protested about mobile phones going off in theatres, but the real menace now is people texting during a show. It may only disturb a few people around them, but for me, as an actor, when I spot them answering their emails, I am outraged.

The elderly are all someone's flesh and blood and we cannot just shut them in a cupboard and hand over the responsibility for taking care of them to the state.

There is something essentially sanguine about me, which I am inclined to attribute to the fact that I was born by caesarean section. It must affect you.

When the BBC decided to bring Doctor Who back as a feature film a few years ago, one national newspaper ran a poll to ask its readers who should be the new Doctor, and I topped it.

Childhood didn't have a big influence on me, really - in fact I spent most of it plotting how to escape.

You could say Shakespeare is so extraordinary precisely because he was so ordinary. He had all the usual anxieties and understandings of what it is to have children, lose children, get married, struggle to make a living and so on.

Artists probably should have some impenetrable aspects of themselves.

Bleak House is just the most astounding piece of work. There's huge, visionary poetry in it.

Everything that we have gone through, are going through, and will go through is there in Shakespeare. It is all of human life.

Having caught a glimpse of what I might be able to do with my talent, I feel a tremendous obligation to try to fulfill it.

He spent hours and hours and hours practising these conjuring tricks. It's just such a curious thing.

I actually wanted to be a writer long before I wanted to be an actor.

I don't have any big regrets.

I don't practise any religion but I am deeply interested in the answers that mankind has come up with to explain the human situation.

I hated Sundays when I was growing up in Streatham, south London. Everything closed down and stopped.

I went to Queen's University Belfast and stayed nine months, then I ran away to be an actor.