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" I wasn't that hard. I wasn't that tough. I wasn't that funny - I looked like me. "

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" I see all these people talking about acting as a great spiritual thing. It's not. 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 could not be one of those actors who stays in character all day long. I'd go mad. "

" I thought 'Lock Stock' was a good film. I thought 'Lock Stock' was a good film because I think it was a one-off before it was imitated a hundred times. "

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

" 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. "

" I don't look like Brad Pitt or Tom Cruise. When you put me on the screen, the women don't want to make love to me, and the men don't want to be me. "

" My friends I grew up with were so supportive to me. And I'm not the only one who's done well. "

" I love Bethnal Green and where I'm from. Nothing there, especially the people, ever held me back, but I never felt that I was successful there. "

" The hardest thing to do and most miserable films are comedies. "

The Hardest Thing

" 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 wouldn't have been interested in making a show just about Hollywood, 'cause I find Hollywood boring. I find people and families very interesting. "

" I've got four kids - I unblock a toilet every day. "

" I'm very blue collar myself. So it was easy for me to embody that in a sense. It's much harder for me to embody Norrell than it is to embody Terry Donovan. "

" It's a very fascinating thing for an actor to play somebody who is suffering, and you have to express the suffering, but in an inarticulate way and sometimes a dysfunctional way, through violence. "

" In my family, there was no celebration of ignorance. They'd come and see Chekhov or Shakespeare. I've got a sister who got a first in her degree. We don't sit around watching TV all the time. "

" 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. "

" 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.' "

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

" I didn't do well at school, and I don't have lots of academic reference points. "

" 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. "

" When I first started doing press, one of the things people started pushing was this idea that I'd somehow escaped something. And I was really offended, because I hadn't escaped anything. "

" 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 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. "

" I was approached to do something for seven years, and it was a quality project. I did seriously think about it, but I didn't want to be away for six months of the year. I've never done the L.A. thing where you go and have loads of meetings; I can't say to my wife, 'I'm going to wait by a pool for six months.' "

" I always define egotistical thoughts as the thoughts I think other people have of me. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Art is the job of the privileged. "

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

" 'Ray Donovan' is very dark and very serious. As actors will tell you, the darker and more serious the material, the more jokes that go around set. It's a counterbalance. "