I just had a throwaway part, really, if you think about it. I'm not a natural actor, you know? I'm a comedian, through and through. And I really love my lines. Those are the lines I want to do.
When I was a kid, I wanted to be an actor in classics like Shaw and Shakespeare and Chekov and Ibsen.
We're not doing brain surgery. We're not saving lives... Even if you're doing Shakespeare, it's still entertainment. We're just entertaining people. We're just doing the stuff that comes on in between the ads.
Acting is just a job. I'm exactly the same as that lady bringing us coffee, and I have to remember that.
That's what I've wanted to do my whole life, just act. When I was younger, I loved to entertain people. I always used to make up dance routines, do little plays. I love to perform, basically.
In my heart of hearts, I love theatre. It's the joy and terror of putting a play on, the creativity of it. It is infinitely harder than film and television and more tiring. Your performance is heightened in the way it isn't with film.
The most challenging work and the best work I've ever done was in a thing I did for PBS called 'Lemon Sky', a play by Lanford Wilson. I think it's the rawest, most complex work that I've had to do, and the thing I'm most proud of.
For me, the ideal job as an actor would be something that is intrinsically a drama but to which I could bring in as much humor as possible.
Theatre, when it is at its best, takes a lot of beating - the live experience and the shared collective experience of live storytelling is really special when it is good. Particularly here in New York because the audiences are amazing, very vocal and very engaged, and that makes theatre very exciting.
The talent that I was blessed with was really for the theater.
We're in the business of using real emotions to bring pretend emotions to life.
When I was about 12, I spent the summer writing four plays on my dad's old typewriter for a school play competition. And I wrote little comic bits at secondary school and at university.
The funny thing is, because I was doing a lot of theater when I was a kid, and a lot of that was musical theater, as I got older I became more interested in acting as a separate entity and music as a separate entity, like songwriting and production and recording and playing music.
I was stage-struck from an early age. I just loved the language. We lived quite near Stratford so I would cycle and watch the plays.
Even Shakespeare gives you a scene off.
School plays are fine. Theater in school is fine.
Everybody is an actor in one way or another. We are all performing certain things.
I sense an actor in me.
Playwrights are like men who have been dining for a month in an Indian restaurant. After eating curry night after night, they deny the existence of asparagus.
I grew up with it. As a young actor, I was always aware of the brilliant work of Shakespeare. We studied Romeo & Juliet and Macbeth in school. As a young actor, you're always mystified and intrigued by such brilliant work. To actually have the chance to be involved in this production was a wonderful thing for me.
If I had planned to be a singer, I would have got trained. In fact, I was more into theatre and plays while growing up.
There's nothing that I love to do more than act and I feel really lucky to be in the position that I'm in, being able to do it as my job! If I ever do anything other than act, it will be in show business.
When I was in high school, I read all of Neil Simon's plays.
In the world of acting, many are thin but few are talented.
Creating a wonderful drama is an art form, while comedy is just entertainment.
