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No Western government has ever played the long-term in terms of foreign policy.
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I investigated post-traumatic stress disorder. I've been to a unit where people are suffering from it, and I read a lot of literature. I looked at footage of soldiers in the combat zone. I found 'Restrepo' to be unbelievably useful.
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Fallible characters are more interesting than superheroes in the end.
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We had a good time mucking about during 'Band of Brothers' when we were young and single.
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I just don't consider myself to be, you know, an American actor. I don't want that life.
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I'm one of those idiots; when I'm working in America, I wake up with an American accent and stay with it all day till make-up comes off.
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The irony is that, coming from a white-collar British background, I tend to play blue-collar Americans!
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I came of age as a male lead actor just as the TV landscape dramatically shifted.
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My parents came to see me in a play at Eton when I was 16. And then, when I said I wanted to try for drama school, they knew there was enough passion there for them to be brave and back me.
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It's successful, middle-class Arab men and women, professionals with seemingly happy family lives, who are prepared to go to paradise for a greater cause. That's terrifying.
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Acting can be a narrow and isolated experience, because you only examine your particular part.
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I found the hedge-fund guys I met all to be very, very concentrated listeners - watchful and articulate and quick to defend, if needed. They all seemed to have this contained sitting posture. The legs, if they weren't crossed at right angles, tended to be close over the knee, their hands put together.
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L.A. still ranks as one of my guilty pleasures, along with butter-pecan ice cream and Coldplay albums.
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A cricket ball broke my nose when I was a kid so I couldn't breath through it. Before I had it operated on I used to stand on stage with my mouth slightly open.
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It's an unfair comparison because when things are developed in the UK, they're developed at script stage only.
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Seeing a man praying to Allah is enough for some people to assume he is a terrorist.
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I went to boarding school, and what that teaches you is to cope emotionally at a young age and to suppress a lot of emotion. Being in the army is, in a way, similar.
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It's good to be busy on a film set because there is a lot of sitting around, so if you've got two roles to play at one time, then that's great to do.
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I'm no more or less antisocial than the next person.
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None of us, remember, knew that 9/11 was gonna happen. We didn't live in a state of anxiety and fear about Osama Bin Laden. The CIA might have, and they failed to prevent it. But the general public didn't have any knowledge. Now we have knowledge of it, and it's a very clear and present danger in our lives.
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I will always find a defense for characters, and that's why it's fun playing characters that are morally ambiguous, or are at least perceived superficially as being problematic.
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I love going for a swim. Growing up in England, anywhere with a pool seems like the height of glamour to me.
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Dramatically it's always more interesting to conceal rather than reveal things.
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I'm sponsored by Audi, so I have this rather lovely rather arrangement where they just insist that I'm always in the latest model.