You have to be ill if you want to get better.
When I'm really into a novel, I'm seeing the world differently during that time— not just for the hour or so in the day when I get to read. I'm actually walking around in a haze, spellbound by the book and looking at everything through a different prism.
I can't imagine seeing Batman in black and white. It was such a colourful TV series. I know. I'm ancient. It wasn't abnormal to be without a television in those days. People who had colour were special.
I have a very long relationship with America. My mother grew up there and I felt to some extent that I partly belong there. I was schooled there briefly for about a year.
In this case it appealed to me partly because it felt close to me in some ways. This is about a confused, bewildered middle class Englishman adrift in smalltown America and that has definitely been me.
If you play a role, you want to familiarize yourself with that person's world. If I were playing an airline pilot or a doctor, I'd probably want to hang out with a doctor or an airplane pilot for a while, ask some questions. You don't get to hang out the kings. They don't help consult on movies. So your resources are, by necessity, secondary.
My singing voice is somewhere between a drunken apology and a plumbing problem.
As much as the next person, I want to be approved of, but I'm not greedy for that stuff.
I think that, often, actors represent what they're not. You get people who define the aristocracy who are not aristocratic - they're lower-middle class or working class. An awful lot of your so-called angry young actors have grown up in extreme bourgeois comfort. It really is surprisingly common.
I think it's quite extraordinary that people cast me as if I'm Warren Beatty: until I met my present wife, at the age of 35, you could name two girlfriends.
I was in a lake in 'Love Actually', and I was attacked by some hideous aquatic beast and was rushed to the hospital by a man named Rafael! Something stung my elbow, and it blew up to the size of a tennis ball.
Bridget Jones is part of literary lore now and actually to be a part of it is enormously flattering.
I backpacked through France and Italy in my teens, and then I was at Cannes with the first movie I did in '84.
I do think I'm a character actor.
My parents and grandparents have always been engaged in teaching or the medical profession or the priesthood, so I've sort of grown up with a sense of complicity in the lives of other people, so there's no virtue in that; it's the way one is raised.
They're not bombarding me with offers, although the ones that have come along have been too preposterous to contemplate, so it's not as if I spend every day resisting $20 million pay cheques.
Obviously, if people love a movie, and it has the possibility of continuation, then there is going to be a question of whether it's worth doing another one. There's also cynicism and skepticism about sequels.
Some people would say comedy draws from some dark places, from your dark stuff. Life's great optimists aren't necessarily the funniest people.
I was delighted to become a popular-culture reference point. I'm still delighted about it actually, and I still find it to be weird.
The thing is that anybody looks good in the right clothes. It will affect your bearing. It will affect your demeanor. It informs the way you behave.
