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I just try to live my life every day by doing the right thing.
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I found that the quality of TV material that came to me was so great and was just often better than the film material I got. And when I find a good movie that I really like, I jump on it because it's exciting to do.
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All you should try to do is behave with honour. If you can. At all times.
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The best shows succeed because they tap into a national conversation.
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I'm not good enough to flip in and out of my Brit accent to my American accent.
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I've always been a narcissist.
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I guess I'm just good at playing repressed individuals. I'm lucky because those are often the roles that catch people's eyes.
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I've been careful to work with good people on interesting material, mostly.
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It's constantly fascinating for me that something that feels absolutely right one year, 12 months later feels like the wrong thing to do.
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I think you can't be really posh and be an interesting actor. I'm a bit of a posh rough.
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I remember, when I was doing 'Nicholas Nickleby', James Archer came to see me at the interval and said, 'My father would like to see you after the show.' It felt rather as if I had been summoned by the Queen, and I was cocky enough to think, 'Who the hell is he to summon me?'
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I am extremely lucky, and I enjoy the level of work that I am able to work at.
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I've done classical theaters. I played Hamlet myself and Romeo.
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You can't be sent away to prison for life and feel OK about it.
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If you only do issue-based drama, you can become a boring wanker.
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There's something important, as an actor, about allowing yourself to be approached by people to do roles. People see different things in you.
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I want to do theatre and film and direct my own things and develop.
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It's certainly true that I was brought up in that British amateur tradition, the one which always held that if you were reasonably good at cricket, knew one or two Latin texts and a few zingy Oscar Wilde quotes for dinner parties, you were pretty much ready to go and run some outpost in Hindustan.
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There is a latent anger in a lot of people that went to boarding school at an early age. I was eight. And I loved it over the five years, but I think the adjustments for eight-year-olds are a lot. And I think it informs who you are for a long, long time.
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In the end, there's something of the puritan work ethic about me that roles really must sustain me on an intellectual level.
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You know, this idea of going around the world imposing democracy by growing a middle-class, a trading merchant class that is independent of your faith, is a good notion, but we're all partially different - it's no good imposing systems on people that it doesn't suit.
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If you have the same drive and passions that everybody else has - for example, if you're trying to do the right thing for your family and do the right thing for people you employ - then you can be forgiven quite a lot.
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I'm very sad 'Life' wasn't a big hit, But it was undone by politics at NBC. It was intense. I moved my wife, and we had two children back to back. So working those hours and living abroad in L.A. was a handful. But it was a great experience.
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In England we burnt redheads at the stake, because we thought they were witches. There are still young redheads in Britain getting ripped for having red hair. 'Oy, Ginger!'