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" I knew very early on that I wasn't Brad Pitt. "

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" Mr. Norrell is like a librarian trying to do magic... That's the story of my career, really. I stand next to good looking men and make them look better! "

" I always think of Gilbert Norrell as being Salieri to Jonathan Strange being Mozart. "

" There's no great mystery to acting. It's a very simple thing to do but you have to work hard at it. It's about asking questions and using your imagination. "

" I had a good job as a printer in the East End. Before the unions destroyed it, that job was very lucrative. "

" I have friends who are leading men, and they're only ever allowed to play leading men of a certain type. But as a character actor, there's a wider variety of projects available. On the big Hollywood films, all they care about is having their lead in place, so it's actually easier for someone like me to slip in. And I'm happy to do so. "

" I sometimes think if I had gone to Oxford or Cambridge and looked like a handsome young guy who could be in an Evelyn Waugh novel or something, I'd be a massive movie star. But there's a longevity to what I do. It's more reliable. Someone isn't deciding that I'm the next big thing. "

" If you're confident, then it helps you live up to your potential, but if you believe because you went to a certain school it means you're entitled to have a particular career, you'll fall flat on your face eventually. "

" I get a lot of people saying to me, 'Oh, you're the actor who plays the nutters,' and I'm not. I'm the guy who plays human beings. I understand why the characters are doing what they're doing. When you play a villain, you don't play a villain: you play a human being doing what he thinks he needs to do to get what he wants. "

" Acting was a way of me finding myself, which I think is the case of a lot of actors, regardless of where they come from. "

" My business is not to show anybody anything; my job is just to do it. "

" When I was a struggling actor, I worked for a party company. One of my friends from school was working for an advertising agency, and I turned up to one of his company's parties dressed as an alien to collect tickets on the door. "

" I'm used to being in front of camera and knowing what to think. But if you're asking me to be me, I get very self-conscious. My job isn't to be me. Being an actor, people think you can do a eulogy at a funeral, a speech at a wedding. I find all that very nerve-racking. "

" I'm not a great fiction reader. I love history. I love history and philosophy. "

" I went swimming the other day and my wife was watching and she said, 'You know, it's funny, it's when you've got no clothes on, no one recognizes you.' I said, 'What are you saying? That I should do more love scenes?' "

" I know what I try to do. I try to be professional, turn up, not make too much fuss, do the job. "

" Private education can give you confidence, which is marvellous; a sense of entitlement isn't. "

" Magic symbolises the subconscious - that part of us that is creative and powerful that we sometimes don't tap into. "

" I've never played a gay character on screen, so that would be interesting. I've never played a gay character, and that would fascinate me because I'm not gay, so that would interest me. "

" I used to do a lot of comedy. I don't know what happened. I think it's my face. "

" You can't write a screenplay if you've been doing a zero-hours contract. Which means that the people who write drama, the people who commission dramas, and the people who direct dramas all come from a small circle of society. "

" The trick to acting is not to show off, it's to think the thoughts of the character. "

" My idea is just to do something different each time; the next thing I do has to be completely different to the thing I've done before - that's what I try and do, because you know, I'm an actor, not a film star. "

" I'm like a mechanic. If you break down and phone the AA, they'll come to you whether it's raining or snowing. That's what an actor should do. "

" I wasn't one of the ones voted most likely to succeed when I was at drama school, but I persevered and concentrated on the acting rather than going to the right parties and getting the right agent. Eventually, after ten years, it paid off. "

" As a working-class actor, leaving school with no qualifications, being a printer and then becoming an actor and then working with people who to a certain extent had had a leg up. I never had that advantage. It's less an artistic need to express myself and more a need to prove myself. "

" When you're the youngest and the only boy, you get spoilt but you get told you're spoilt so you don't get to enjoy it very much. I was the only man in the house because my parents divorced and my dad moved away when I was 13. "

" I was brought up in a house full of women; the first time I realised no one was interrupting me was when I was on stage - that's probably the subconscious reason I became an actor. "

" I'm used to playing characters who have a lot to say but don't know how to say it. "

" I knew what kind of actor I was going to be, and I looked for inspiration to people like Alec Guinness, Cyril Cusack, Timothy Spall and Jim Broadbent. I looked at them and thought, 'They play human beings as they really are.' "

" You turn up on set, and somebody who has come out of Oxford, has done a BBC course, is telling you how to act. You think, 'Do me a favour. Go and make a coffee.' "