JOE THOMAS

You don't need to over-dramatise life, you can just reflect it. It's more interesting, in a way, if it appears to ring true.

Men and women have different ideas of what constitutes tidiness. I tend to think it's about things being clean, but my mum and girlfriend are more about how things look.

Most period drama is so earnest. A lot of it is about making yourself take seriously things you wouldn't normally.

The last person to teach me how to act was my A-level Theatre Studies teacher at school, which I literally still draw on. Got an A!

I live in a flat in central London. I do like it there; there's always stuff going on. But I do crave a bit of peace and quiet.

I still spend my time feeling sorry for myself and making serious mistakes.

At university, I said to a girl, 'Before I met you all I could think about was history; now, all I can think about is you'. I thought that was the sort of thing you had to say.

I did a history degree once.

I was religious with the way I stretched, the way I would do my soft-tissue work, whether it be massages or foam rollers. I was very good about getting in the hot tub and cold tub, and getting in the training room. I also love to do yoga, and I give yoga a lot of credit for my longevity in the NFL.

You look at guys with significant Alzheimer's and dementia and the mood swings and the suicides that unfortunately NFL players have been faced with. And depression. Lou Gehrig's disease. These are all things that have kind of been linked to the brain damage from football.

And I could always count on that day because, those who love good Jet's Pizza understand that one slice of Jet's Pizza is like 400 calories. So I knew if I ate 8-10 slices, I would be able to maintain my weight for that week and basically kind of boost it for our weigh-in on Friday.

Goodbye not because I'm retiring, but because I'm merely changing jobs. From being your left tackle to being the No. 1 fan of the Cleveland Browns.

If you look historically at the draft at quarterbacks in the top 10, about half of them flame out very quickly.

I can say confidently that I don't think Austin Corbett is going to play tackle in the NFL.

I'm not a huge offensive lineman.

We cannot just be nonracist. We really do need to be antiracist.

But the way I look at it is just about every profession in our society: There's some lasting effects. It's just the way that our society is set up. People have to work.

I was more eager to lose weight than almost anything in retirement.

In order to spur progress, we all need to be people who point out and shine a spotlight on racism wherever we see it. It doesn't always have to be confrontational, but it does need to become the societal norm that racism is identified and not tolerated in any form or fashion.

Growing up in a predominantly white area of the predominantly white state of Wisconsin, it was, I'm sad to say, relatively easy for me to go through life without recognizing or reckoning with the obvious signs of racism.

You have to be able to process 1,000 things that are happening at one time and be able to decide the right technique to use. And have the reaction between what your eyes are seeing and what your hands and feet need to do.

Coming in, you're so concerned about learning your job and the things you need to do to be successful individually. Once that's good, you can start to focus on learning guys around you and learning defenses and what they're trying to do to you.

My mentality from the day I started playing sports was that you get up, you dust yourself off and you do it again.

When the game gets eyeballs in newspapers and on TV, that's what in the end is the goal for everyone.

It's important to try and balance my own diet, my own health, my own lifestyle, with the needs of my family.